I have a question that I hope some of you SEO Consultants will not mind answering for me. I have been doing my own SEO on my sites over the last 18 months. I have been approached by a company that I have done some affiliate work for to be their SEO consultant and build links for their 6 websites. They want me to tell them how much I will charge to do this. I have a number in mind, but was hoping some of you would share with me what would be a reasonable price to charge for this service. Links will be built manually, not purchased except for a few directories. If you don't want to post here you can email me at Regards Hubert
Hey that is a nice site you have there. ... and 600,000 links in yahoo, care to outline your link building strategy?
Not sure wher that number came from. Yahoo is showing 344,000 when I checked. I have noticed that Yahoo will sometimes count your internal links as well as your external links. I have purchased some strong authority links, and have been built many links with exchanges. I send out several linking requests a day. Many of the webmasters have many sites, which can easily turn 100 email requests into 300 links. The company I am talking with told me they didn't want to purchase too many text links (they looked at the cost of text link brokers and got scared I think) and that they wanted to do it manually? I told them that was a serious time endeavor and that's when they asked what I would charge to do it. I just don't know what to charge for it. I was thinking of a flat monthly fee per site, but not sure what that fee should be.
I would charge a monthy fee and give them a number of hours per week you can dedicate to each site. Just be careful not to promise anything you can't deliver.
Im interested in knowing how, in situations like this, if they are not happy with the results, ie they dont end up ranked #1 in the SE's like they wanted, how do you deal with that?
Well I've already told them upfront that I could not make them any guarantees as it goes to search placement. Just too many variables involved.
If you search through threads in the Buy/Sell folder you should find several posts which show what others are charging. You can do the same on Google, though it's often harder to find seo sites that actually quote rates. I've seen anywhere from $3 to $8 per link depending on the number of links you purchase; as well as the quality of the site, Page Rank of the page, number of links and placement on page, etc. I'd say somewhere in the middle is average for manual recip link management. You could also charge hourly but make sure you can account for time spent both finding sites, submitting requests, listing backlinks, AND confirming everything. Go over in detail what they expect from you and then double the time you think it will take you to handle everything (cause you'll also be spending time just talking with your client, or preparing reports).