How to Price for SEO

SEO is very important to the online business with on average the number of leads the search engines produce being anything from 60% – 100% of the visitors to a website. So as an SEO how do you work out your SEO pricing. I find this part of the job one of the hardest. Search engine optimisation and pricing, it is a minefield. Price too low and the client thinks your unskilled at your art, price too high and your run the risk of pricing yourself out of the job. So where’s the middle ground.
SEO is a two stage process the first being the on page optimisation where the structure and content is optimised to take full advantage of how the search engines rank a page / site. The second stage is off site optimisation this involves building links to the site from relevant sources across the internet. Pricing should always reflect the amount of time that is going to be spent on the optimisation process. A rule of thumb is an newly trained SEO’s time is worth £25 per hour and an SEO at the top of their game can be worth up to £175 an hour. So you should be pricing for your SEO service accordingly.
Word of warning, if you are a new to the world of SEO, know your own level. You don’t have to tell your customer, but if you price according to the the results you expect, then you shouldn’t go far wrong. There is nothing more irritating then an SEO who is over confident and under skilled, they give the whole industry a bad name.

Method one: Price on performance SEO

This sounds simple, you get the customer on first page and they pay you. This method is problematic especially with the introduction of personalised search. You may find yourself educating your clients on the search engines so they can validate the data you send over in your monthly report. I’ve talked to business owners who have used this type of service and it seems to turn into a pay us if you want to relationship. With the client only paying when they think the seo company has done enough. This may seem the fairest but its often the SEO company that is left out of pocket.
This opens the system up to abuse by not having a set metric. I normally see this sort of SEO pricing at the lower end of the market with uncompetitive phrases and localised search. Price wise you are looking at £50 – £150 a month on phrases with moderately low level of competing sites.

Full article on SEO pricing