SEO Pricing Models: How Much Should You Charge?

For six years now, I’ve been the founder, CEO, and president of a search engine optimization company, and I’ve maintained one additional role, that I soon hope to relinquish.

Salesperson.

My reluctance in hiring a salesperson is that finding the right person for the job can be quite a challenge. “Selling” search engine optimization (SEO) is a very consultative venture and one that I’m loath to turn over to someone mostly motivated by a commission check.

Selling SEO requires that you know the space well, and that you’re able to balance the need to bring revenue into the company while ensuring that you’re bringing in business which won’t lead to future headaches, because:

Expectations weren’t set appropriately.
The prospect lacks an understanding of the process.
There aren’t enough resources on the client’s side (or not enough money to outsource) for generating content, addressing issues, and implementing recommendations.
The work isn’t properly scoped out so that we can gain a solid estimation as to the work that will be involved (so that the work doesn’t end up being unprofitable).
It’s that last piece that I’m going to address, today.

Scoping Out and Pricing an SEO Effort

In order to survive as a well-run business, we must make sure that we operate profitably. Just as I might look at the probability of generating a positive ROI for prospects that come seeking SEO services, so too must I focus on ensuring that my company also runs profitably.

To that end, I made a decision, years ago, to hire a head of operations who also happened to have a background in process improvement. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a CPA. Her name is Kim Patterson, and she also happens to be my wife’s cousin (so you headhunters can just keep on looking).

Kim came to the company with no background in SEO. Over the years, she has learned the process and has put in place measurements of effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability that I believe had been sorely lacking in our industry.

Another major component of bringing Kim on was to make sure that we were charging a fair rate (one which was within Industry standards, one which helped us to reach our profitability goals and one which would be reasonable, based upon what value we bring to our clients).

I asked Kim what formula she uses to price our SEO initiatives. Her response:

First, you need to determine your profit goals (15 percent; 20 percent; 30 percent; more?). You calculate your fixed overhead costs (costs that you pay no matter what your sales are), variable costs (what costs go up as sales go up – and what the relationship is to the sale dollar; not all relationships are the same for each sector of your biz) and direct costs (what actual direct labor, direct services, etc) for the actual job and make sure when it all is put together you end up with your targeted profit.

The real tricky part here is determining the direct costs. SEO projects can’t be precisely scoped out for everything that you might do for the next 12 months. Part of SEO is analysis and recommendations, based upon what we see in the SERPs, analytics, competitive analysis, and industry changes/opportunities, among other things.

Pricing SEO is one of the great challenges, because most prospects still have a basic understanding of search engine optimization and the time/work involved in the efforts. The best that anyone can do is get a sense for how much time may be required to spend adequate time to address specific goals.

Rand Fishkin provided a tremendous value when, in 2007, he wrote a quality post on pricing SEO. Granted, this was written over four years ago.

Can you think of much that is cheaper today than it was four years ago? If supply and demand are the drivers for pricing, I would suggest that demand far exceeds (good) supply. There are many people who lay claim to being good at SEO, and a scarce few who truly do it well.

Today, I hope to peel back the onion just a bit, to help you to understand how search engine optimization is priced and how you, too, might want to consider your pricing models for SEO.

SEO Pricing Structure

Many firms still offer package rates for SEO. In fact, there’s one firm that is driving me absolutely crazy because they’re spamming a client of mine with emails. Here’s an example of one such email:

I just got the details from XXX management on our July SEO Special, and here they are…… “Summer Gold Rush” Special

Our National Gold Plan - Regularly Priced at $2750 per month will be greatly discounted for ONLY 30 new clients starting July 11

The 2011 Summer SPECIAL:

Only $1999/mo for the life of the account
That's a $751 monthly savings
That's approx 27% off each month for 30 lucky clients
Equal to saving over $9,000 per year
Clients can purchase multiple specials

*Starts as a 3-month agreement, then runs month-to-month

To me, an SEO effort isn't a package of tactical deliverables. Unless you’re simply hiring a company to merely provide tactical work (keyword research, site structure analysis, competitive analysis, SEO audit, analytics review, usability consulting), SEO is something that is unique to every website, competitive environment, client goal(s), and assets (news, blog, product search, local, video, image, etc.) and is ongoing with review and “optimization” (there is a reason that “O” exists in “SEO”).

Just as you’d expect to scope out a website design and development project, so too must you scope out a search engine optimization effort.

Who’s going to write the content?
Who is responsible for PR efforts?
Who is handling social marketing?
Who’s doing link building?
Who’s restructuring the website, as necessary?

Today’s SEO is about bringing together many facets of your marketing, web design/development and PR/social efforts so that they work well together.

All of these things go to “scope” and each requires time (either the agency's time or the company’s time). And, yes – time is money.

Setting Pricing Structure

When we go through the process of determining how much a search engine optimization effort might be, it goes directly to how much time we have to spend on the initiative.

Yes, we have some basic templates to follow, in terms of what is generally included in most SEO efforts, but then we need to dig deeper into the time that might be needed to address items which the prospect has mentioned are “goals” of the effort, and address any human resource allocation that we may need to provide because the prospect isn’t adequately staffed.

Cost of Talent

We’ve all seen the ads: “$400/Month for SEO.” How can one firm be charging $400 per month while another is proposing a monthly cost of $20,000 per month? What’s the difference?

In most cases, it comes down to people. In my past, I was the president of an SEO firm that had over 30 “employees” (contractors) offshore. We paid those folks $300-$400 per month for full-time employment.

I won’t speak for all offshore firms/contractors, but our experience with these contractors wasn’t very positive. A couple guys were good, but more often than not, the work would need to be redone by our staff in the U.S., or otherwise we sold the services so cheaply that the client’s expectations were low and so “it worked.”

It depends on your expectations.

If you think that the $400 a month guys are doing “the same thing” as the $20,000 a month guys, you’re probably going to be wrong. Chances are the $20,000 a month guys are hiring people that cost more than $400 a month. While the deliverables may seem the same (anyone can get their hands on the $20,000 a month company’s proposal, and find/replace with their company name and say “we do the same thing”), at the end of the day, you’re paying for the people/process/software/experience of the firm(s).

Cost of Software

There are plenty of great free SEO tools. Due to the length of this post, I can’t get into them all.

Then, there are plenty of great tools that cost significant amounts of money. The firms charging $20,000 per month may very well be using software for management of the efforts that cost $10,000 a month. It’s something to consider. Some of these pieces of software are slick, and I can see that larger companies would want this type of information/dashboard/reporting, because they need to work with a firm that is very polished and professional.

Amount of Talent Needed

Small effort? Perhaps we only need one person.

Small-ish effort, but the client has no webmaster, copywriter, PR folks, link builder, etc.? We may need to put a lot of resources into a project that would cost quite a bit of money and the ROI may simply not be there, for this small business.

If a project is properly scoped, you should be able to get a general sense as to how much time/work/effort may need to come from the client, and how much will need to come from the agency. Some efforts can become quite complex, with web designers, developers, copywriters, PR staff, social marketing, video optimization, SEO analysts, link builders, analytics specialists, usability consultants, etc.

If you need more resources, you’ll be paying more (whether it’s to your in-house team or to your agency).

ROI Estimation

As I mentioned above, many times, the effort needed for an SEO effort, and the time needed to realize results, can prevent many companies from affordably investing in search engine optimization. And, there are many times when companies are infatuated with “free” search engine traffic that they don’t realize that there are simply not that many searches for keywords that are relevant to their business.

If there are no fish in the pond, no amount of bait in the world is going to catch you a fish. Comprendé?

This is why one of my favorite tools is SEMRush. You can check out the estimated value of the organic traffic for your competitors, and compare that with where your website is currently, and get a sense as to whether there will be value available to you in your efforts.

If you see that all of your identified competitors are getting $200 a month “worth” of organic search traffic each month, it’s going to be hard to justify spending any amount of money on organic search. You might be best off to invest in a pay-per-click effort. At least with paid search, you’re guaranteed to pay only when you actually get a click.

Amortization of Efforts

The real value of SEO efforts are, generally, not realized in the first month(s) of the effort. Folks ask me all the time, “how soon until we see results?” The honest answer is “hard to say, but our guess is ____.”

We don’t own the search engines, so we can’t make guarantees. But, if a search engine optimization firm has dug into the competitive landscape and done a fair amount of research, they should be able to determine whether an opportunity to have a profitable SEO effort is possible, even if it may take some time. This is where you should be considering the lifetime value of the effort.

You didn’t get into business thinking that you’d start and be profitable, right away (at least, not most of you). In fact, when I started my company, I didn’t take a salary for over a year and I expected that there was a price to pay to be in business.

With search engine optimization, it’s kind of the same way. There will be a period of time (perhaps as small as a couple of months, and perhaps as long as many years) when money and time is going out, and there’s not an equal amount of value coming in. But, if you’ve done your homework, and know that the opportunity for great value is there, and you “plan your work and work your plan,” you can realize gains that can far exceed the value in “pay per click” models.

One such company in an extremely competitive industry for SEO was being charged $6,000 per month for SEO and was getting OK value for a couple of years, and now – five years later – realizes an approximate value of $319,000 “worth” of organic search traffic each month. Even if they were getting “no” value whatsoever for the first two years (invested $144,000 total) to one day realize a monthly value of $319,000 (each and every month), you’d say that this is a pretty good investment, right?

It doesn’t always come to these types of valuations. Just like the TV ads say, “results will vary.” For this particular client, they happen to be in a space which people search for these keywords veryoften.

For the local business owner, that’s one of the critical pieces in determining whether SEO is for you. What is the “search universe”? How many times are people searching for your keywords?

So, How Do You Price Your SEO Efforts?

Do you know if the efforts are profitable? How do you measure profitability?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, in the comments section below.

Optimizing Your Website for Mobile and Tablet Devices

Is your site optimized for the mobile and tablet generation? There’s no such thing as being lost in the woods anymore thanks to mobile and tablet technology, which gives consumers the power to directly connect from the palm of their hands. This means your site has to visually evolve as technology shrinks.

Here’s how you minimize your site while maximizing your searchability.

Smarterphone, Smarterconsumer, Smartersite

Having a mobile version of your site gives you the advantage of reaching the instant consumer. In 2011, we’re no longer sitting at our desks waiting for a page to load; we can be anywhere when pages load. That’s why it’s crucial you make sure your site is available in the mobile world, and optimized properly for optimal searching and customer-site connection. Here’s how you do it:

Google AdWords now lets you search keywords that are specific to mobile devices, helping you narrow down exactly what words you need to use to reach the instant consumer.
Take the same SEO formula used for classic site optimization and optimize your mobile site – use your mobile keywords to create your meta titles, title tags, and headers.
Don’t overload your reader. Keep your content short and simple, make sure images are smaller to help give the instant consumer the best mobile experience possible.
Make sure fonts are nice and clear, and important direction buttons are bigger. Remember this is all being viewed on a small screen.

To help make sure the instant consumer lands on the mobile version of your site when they’re strolling down the street reading their smartphone, you have to do some quick website revamping to turn your site from computer-friendly to mobile-friendly.

Most sites have two URLs: one for mobile and one for computer. The SEO advantage to having a mobile version of your site is that Google now has a designated bot that crawls around looking for mobile versions of classic sites to index.

This means you have two pages of the same site indexed as one. This is a huge advantage for you because it means that if your mobile and classic site is optimized properly, you’re even more searchable.

Mobile To-Do Guide

Here are three key things you need to do right now to make your site mobile-friendly:

1. Optimize for Mobile: Know The Basics

Make content visually appealing for limited screen viewing by using CSS in your coding. Reduce the image sizes and ensure fonts and content are simple enough to quickly scan and understand.
Optimize your content and images by including the keywords found in your Google AdWords mobile search, and strategically sprinkle them throughout your pages. Best practice is to avoid using any ads – it’s hard enough to see your content.

Quick tip: If your site is e-commerce based, get an app developed. An app gives you the competitive edge you need to keep your customer from browsing the web and looking at your competition; instead it places them directly in your virtual store via your app.

2. Consider Your Design Options: Google Transcode and Mobile Subdomain

Google Transcode: Using Google’s configuration tool to transcode your site from classic HTML to mobile HTML won’t give your user a unified experience. When you get Google to the do work you risk having images and content resized in unattractive ways, duplicate content/error pages, and overall bad user experience. How do you avoid this? Make a mobile subdomain.
Mobile Subdomain: Make a subdomain specifically for your mobile site. You can do this by creating a subdomain txt files. This is a key factor for search direction and indexing. Having one distinct mobile URL keeps your mobile optimization from interfering with your classic optimization (keeping the same experience on the small screen), and allows the GoogleBot Mobile to visit and index the mobile version for mobile searches.

Quick tip: Avoid using Flash, Java, Ajax and Frames. Instead try XHTML (WAP 2.0), cHTML (iMode) or WML (WAP 1.2).

3. Mobile Preview: Don’t Be Fooled

Run your site through WSC Mobile to ensure it is mobile-friendly and test, test, test it on multiple browsers and devices.

Quick tip: Not everyone has made the switch to a smartphone; there are still a number of users using classic phones. You’ve got to make sure your site looks good no matter what screen it’s on. Rethink your coding and design options, and look into apps.

The Rise of the Tablet

Now that we’ve covered why you need a mobile version of your site, let’s switch our minds over to tablets. Tablets are quickly replacing laptops and televisions – they’re lighter and easier to pack, making them more attractive for people on-the-go.

The top four ways consumers use tablets are:

Organizing recreational activities
Online shopping
Reading news or blogs
Social networking

Unlike the majority of mobiles, tablets rely mostly on Wi-Fi and 3G for connectivity. Making your site tablet-friendly means you’ve got to make it fast. Optimizing your site for tablet means you’ve got to make it familiar and simple.

Here’s what you need to think about:

Offering your site in classic and mobile versions gives you the upper hand if the user is using an iPad. Remember iPads don’t use Flash. If you have Flash content on your site, simply redirect the user to the mobile version, and everyone’s happy. Also consider making your site in HTML5.
If your site is primarily e-commerce based have an application developed that directly connects your products to the instant consumer in one tap. Apps easily store all your information in one place and remove the annoyance of waiting for a page to load. They also make the paying experience more enjoyable. The only disadvantage to an app is: it’s not picked up in organic search results.
Having a content heavy site is great but it can be time consuming and irritating to scroll down for what seems like forever. Avoid this consumer pet peeve by including “Previous” and “Next” buttons for easy content navigation.

Tablet To-Do

Here’s a top 10 list of what you need to do right now to make your site tablet friendly:

1. Limit duplicate content by changing CSS so it’s optimized for tablet viewing.
2. No Flash, you’re good. Flash, make sure there’s a redirection to your mobile site from the tablet.
3. Don’t overwhelm visitors with scrolling fever - include “Previous” and “Next” buttons to help guide them through your content and web pages.
4. Consider creating an app for e-commerce pages and information storage to help avoid irritation and slow loading time.
5. Optimize check-out process for visitors by using cookies, postal codes, and PayPal.
6. Make it touchable: use HTML5 and CSS3 to create scrolling and horizontal navigation to put all content on one page, not giving the visitor a tab-attack.
7. Adding CSS to increase the size of buttons on your page to make your site more attractive and user-friendly from the tablet perspective. No one really wants to zoom in that close.
8. Offer downloadable content by creating PDF versions of your sites content or important information. This also gives them the option to store your content for future reading.
9. Remember the 5 viewing angles: Vertical and landscape in both mobile and tablet, and the straight desktop view. Take advantage of the viewing options available.
10. Test, Test, Test – test to make sure it’s good to go and makes a returning impression.

Devices might be getting smaller, but search opportunities and consumer-to-site connection is expanding. You now have indexing for mobile sites, instant purchasing and sharing, and individually developed apps that remove users from the browser and place them directly into a niche online store, keeping their attention focused on the most important goal: conversion.

Getting Social Traffic on the SERPs Without SEO

It’s coming up on a year since Matt Cutts announced that social signals are absolutely used as ranking factors for your content, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about here.

I’m going to talk about other ways that social can drive organic traffic to your site outside of links being retweeted or publicly shared by influencers.

Personalization

If you perform a search on Google for SEO, you’ll see something similar to the image below (I stripped out the paid ads). Note the position of the various results, especially the third result with is for a completely different definition of SEO.



Now what if I’m logged into Google? What will I see? Well, for me, it looked like this (again with the paid ads removed).



It looks a bit different. Suddenly there are people that I’m connected to with my Google account showing up under results they’ve indicated that they like, through some form of sharing.

The first two results are the same, but Aaron Wall’s site SEOBook.com, which was sitting in fifth when I wasn’t logged in, is now third for me. In fourth I now see the SEOmoz.org home page. When I wasn’t logged in, there were articles from SEOmoz in 9th and 14th, but their home page wasn’t showing until 21st position, way down the SERPs. Thanks to Keri there’s a much higher chance that I would click on it with it being 17 places higher than it normally ranks.

Everything else not shared by my network remains in the same order, although pushed down one or two spots based on their original position. So here social sharing within my group of contacts has changed my view of the SERPs and potentially my click behavior.

The same is also true of Bing. I did the below search for “NFL Picks” which shows the results from the third text link down.



Then I logged into Facebook and did the same search, and you can see the results aren’t too different, apart from the “Liked by your Facebook Friends” section, which suddenly surfaces a new video, a video that, when logged out, I don’t see surfacing in the top 100 results. Once again, my social network has personalized my version of the SERPs to give some content a greater chance of being clicked on that it generally has.



Even where the search results haven’t changes, I’m seeing the smiling faces of my Facebook friends sitting next to results that they’ve ‘liked’. If these people in my social circle are people that I trust, then the likelihood that I’ll click on that content rather than on the ‘unliked’ content ranking above them increase.

Real Time Results

When Google had their Twitter deal (prior to discontinuing it in July of this year) they would show a scrolling list of results in the SERPs. If users saw something they liked, they could click on a link within a particular tweet and open up a new page.

While Google doesn’t have real time search in their results, they have said that it will be returning at some point soon, with Google Plus as an integral part.

Bing currently displays their social results on a their social page but it would be hard to say that they’re “real time.”



That said, around the time of the Emmys, I saw Bing conducting a test of a Twitter widget. This widget showed up on the right side of the SERPs, with a list of results scrolling upwards.



This widget was good because it was less obtrusive than breaking the SERPs up with a scrolling list in the middle, and that it also displayed the domain of the shortened links. So no worrying about where the t.co was going to take you. All in all, I found it to be a good solution for displaying real time Twitter results, and therefore a good potential source of clicks on a SERP where your content may not be ranking organically.

Now, I’ve not seen this widget again since that weekend, and I don’t know whether it’s something they’re still testing, but it shows that both major search engines are trying to come to terms with the best ways to show social results in search results.

8 Durable SEO Elements

Recent changes to Google’s search ranking algorithms and highly publicized search penalization of well-known brands, have caused much angst in the SEO community. However, Google’s changes to its algorithms aren’t new.

Seasoned SEOs have experienced major algorithm changes over the last decade. In fact, Google has confirmed making on average at least one change per day to its search algorithms. Clearly change is here to stay.

How do you minimize the impact of these inevitable changes? Focus your efforts on the durable elements of SEO. These are the cardinal elements of SEO that will stay true regardless of Google’s ongoing improvements to its algorithms.

These eight durable elements will withstand the test of time because they are aligned with Google’s explicit statements and implicit motivations. Here’s a rundown of these elements and practical steps you can take to align your website with them.

1. Basic On-Page SEO Rules

The basic keyword SEO rules per the Google Webmaster’s SEO Guide are easy to communicate and easy to follow. Google wants you to follow these rules, because it makes crawling easier for their bots, which leads to better results for users, and in turn, helps Google with market share.

Make sure your pages are optimized for these basic SEO rules. Include target keywords in your URLs, titles, meta tags, H1s, etc. Determine which pages rank for which keywords. Then use the right keywords to double-down your efforts on these pages.

2. Inbound Quality Links

An inbound link from an external website to your website signals to Google that the content it’s pointing at is relevant to the subject surrounding that link. Quality inbound links aren’t easy to amass and they require your content to be good enough for someone else to reference. For these reasons, quality inbound links are believed to have the biggest impact on ranking.

Continue building your inbound links through white hat content syndication and promotions. Create unique content that others will want to reference and link to. Build relationships with other web writers, so they are aware of your content.

3. Authority

Google’s Internet is a meritocracy and authority is essentially your assigned status within this order. To date, Google has confirmed using only Google PageRank and social media authority as the two types of authority signals in their ranking algorithm.

A website’s authority is factored into rankings. There will always be those who attempt to game the system rather than advance on merit, so diminished authority is one way Google punishes fraud.

Build your authority by creating unique content and follow white hat practices. Build relationships with authoritative sites and users. Pursue links from them to benefit from their authority too.

4. User Experience

Google wants their users to be satisfied. If Google gives high ranks to bad websites, with terrible designs, slow page load speed, and difficult-to-navigate pages, users will look for alternative search solutions.

A fast page load speed and a low bounce rate are two measureable indications of a good user experience. Additional qualitative measures include a nice design, easy navigation and a good UI.

Basically, anything that makes a user remain on your site and read more. Keep your site updated, measure your bounce rate and page load speed, and create clear alignment between the keywords you target, your content and the experience you’re creating for your visitors.

5. Freshness

If relevancy is the name of the game, then freshness is its nickname. The world is evolving and so is the web, and freshness of content will always be an indication of a site keeping up with the world. Freshness is a supporting factor to a site’s authority and plays a huge part in news ranking.

Keep creating new content as well as updating existing content. Link to it internally from indexed pages as well as syndicate it on social media. Register your site and submit a sitemap to Google. If you have a news site, register to be on the Google News Index.

6. Diversity

To borrow from the capital investment world, diversification minimizes your systematic risk allowing you higher overall return on investment, and it would appear Google follows this rule. Google prefers diversity in the format and content of its results.

Use multiple formats to deliver your content on the same page – video, presentations, images – and publish unique pages for diverse content to optimize for long tail terms. Submit a unique sitemap to Google for formats other than text.

7. Feedback

In order to gauge their effectiveness, Google must collect feedback on its work. From machine input, like click through rate and bounce rate, to human input, like human evaluators, Google’s “manual intervention” and Google +1, Google will keep collecting feedback to improve its results.

Use only white hat tactics, be relevant and optimize your pages to the actual content on them. In addition, syndicate, promote and give people an easy way to share their feedback.

8. Compatibility with Updated Technology

Being compatible with new technologies such as new browsers is important to the overall user experience. Freshness is always good practice when it comes to being on top.

As an example, consider mobile devices. With the emergence and rapid growth of the mobile market, we can see how and why, in the future, Google will discount sites that aren't mobile device-compatible.

Make sure your site is up-to-date with the latest mainstream technology. For example, verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google and submit a mobile sitemap.