Hourly Consulting
The simplest way to price a project is to charge by the hour. Rates in SEO vary with the lowest, entry level pricing around $40.00 - $50.00, mid-tier pricing is around $100.00 - $200.00 and high-demand firms & people from $300.00 - $500.00. These are typical pricing guidlines, which can and will change based on project budgeting and other factors.
Project Based Consulting
Many SEOs will use the business model common to web development agencies and charge a flat fee (often in several chunks over the course of a project). The total price is based on an estimate of time, effort and personnel involved in the project. Some SEO companies often charge in this fashion for a site review + keyword research + consulting time or for an on-site SEO training series.
Contract Services
Plenty of SEOs offer dozens of individual services, such as directory submission service, link building & publicity campaigns or SEO assessment services. These offerings present a single price for a set amount of work.
Standard Profit Sharing
Some limited number of SEO providers offer profit sharing based compensation. These frequently include a relatively small down payment to begin work and then a percentage of revenues (usually before non-essential expenses) from sales through the website. This can be a good option for SEOs who have great confidence in their abilities and are ready to assume a significant share of risk.
Modified Profit Sharing
As above, but modified profit sharing typically includes a clause that gives the SEO firm a cut prior to any expenses and may even set minimums of payment. Other modifications could make the deal similar to a Pay-Per-Action (PPA) or Pay-Per-Lead, the latter of which can be a better way to limit risk. Both SEOs and those seeking their services should be wary of any kind of profit-sharing deal.
Monthly Retainer
A few good SEO firms use a basic monthly retainer with a standard workload package (or several options). This system can be modified so that during development, marketing & ongoing maintenance, different prices are charged as part of the retainer. This can be a very good model for companies seeking to retain clients over a long period of time, but it can also be abused by those who claim that the site will "lose its rankings" if the customer cancels.
Pay for Rankings
This is one of the more interesting strategies that SEOs employ. The idea being that you pay one price for reaching, say, page 2 of a particular result, another price for position 10, 9, 8 and so on, usually with particular bonuses for rankings of 1-3. It really only makes sense for companies seeking to rank for a particular set of terms/phrases that they know converts quite highly.
Pay for Traffic
As with Pay-per-Ranking, a traffic payment system treats SEO very much like PPC. This model is fine in some respects, because it does measure the SEO's work, but it can get messy as the quality of traffic isn't measured here; of course, this usually only counts search engine traffic - (organic traffic).
- Hourly billing is in increments of minutes as follows:
1-15 (minutes) is one quarter
- 15-30 (minutes) is two quarters
- 30-45 (minutes) is three quarters
- 45-60 (minutes) is a full hour of billing
- Pricing is the standard industry billing for SEO services.
- All prices subject to change without notice.
- One free consultation per customer.
- All additional consultations of up to a half hour are USD50.00 each.
- Require 50% down to get started.
- Standard Hourly Rate. $40.00
- All payments are non-refundable.
Admin
