What do you think SEO is worth?

[CarolP]

Willa,

I agree with your comments that basing SEO on value is the way to go. it all comes down to ROI. If it delivers the client value, then the fee is worth it.

I've seen agencies develop $500k websites that are poorly optimized and that don't convert very well. And the client does not know any better. I've also seen them pay higher pay per click rates because the website does not convert well.

Having the right keywords is the foundation to any website. Paying $100K for an SEO package is a better investment than a poorly optimized website that costs $500K and does not convert.

Cheers
Carol

[Debra]

Good ideas guys Ive been studying SEO for about 3 months now, and have gotten some great page 1 results for myself and friends businesses, I want to look at doing a Local Business Specialist for SEO soon what extra training do you guys think is worth paying for?

Thanks

[aajvcad]

Hi,

I like all the comments so far.

The way I see it: It really depends on your experiance and how you feel about the service you will provide.

Charge what you feel comfortable with.

On the other hand every business you promote will be different. I have cliants that pay as little as 690/month all the way up to $3500.

Usually the higher paying cliants are in very competative niches and have alot of money. like lawyers. for $3500/month, they expect resaults and you have to deliver.

Only their main webpage on forst page of google is not enough, for this price I position 3-5 of their online properties on the first page.

To keep cliants happy you might have to create additional web properties and rank them high aswell.

So charge according to the work you will have to put in, the niche competition and your skill.

Hope this has helped.

Any more questions please ask.

Alem

[marketingweb]

SEO is worth the extra business that is able to be generated based on being on the front page of Google. No point being #1 if it generates no extra business. If it generates $1 million in extra revenue, then $50,000 would be money well spent as a marketing expense.

To aajvcad's previous comment, $3500 a month would be cheap in some industries, but on the low end of $690 mentioned, this is way above what some local businesses need to pay.

FOR EXAMPLE - one of my customer sites Twin City Mowing Services is #1 for virtually everything everything he wants to be, and in the top few for anything that isn't #1. But his target phrases are "lawn mowing albury", "lawn mowing lavington", "lawn mowing thurgoona", "garden care albury" etc. With a limited geographical area and low competition, there was only a couple hundred dollars in SEO work (beyond the website website development costs) and it pretty much sits there at number 1 with minimal ongoing link building.

To a business like this one my service was brilliant value. If he needed to pay $690 a month - it would be completely uneconomical for him as he is really only looking for a few new clients a month to be successful.

For anyone who care's reference, my services for SEO start at $150 per month with a minimum 3 months for low competition locally based phrases. But I was asked to quote on something like "mortgages" or "real estate" I think I would just put a 1 and the hold down the 0 key for a couple minutes to give me a figure! lol

Matt

[Heidi Price]

hmmm.....

this thread has got me thinking - because the basic SEO we include with a website package consistently results in first page rankings. We are not charging extra for it.

For example, one site we manage is outranking its suppliers for product searches. All these suppliers are household name, international companies.

This is because we have a natural-born SEO-er in house!

But just maybe we should start charging a separate fee......

[marketingweb]

Hi Heidi,

It's an interesting point and one I definitely have found myself although in most cases it hasn't been against international brand names - sounds like you are doing very well, congratulations on your success.

One thought though - I ALWAYS find it easier to rank a site i've built myself than an existing site someone else has built, unless I basically rebuild the site's structure, content etc pretty much from scratch. I think what we both realise is that if you build a site correctly from the ground up you can't help but rank it reasonably well. But if it's not built right then it's a bigger job.

Hence why treating SEO as an afterthought is a bad idea, and why "build it once, build it right" is the key message, the whole site needs to be built with SEO in mind, and why working with a designer such as Heidi Price (or humbly, myself) who "gets" SEO will get better results then treating it as an addon later once the site is built.

That said though, some industries / niches will rank fairly well with a well built site, but link building still does come into play.

Matt

[seocourse]

Originally Posted by aajvcad

Hi,

I like all the comments so far.

The way I see it: It really depends on your experiance and how you feel about the service you will provide.

Charge what you feel comfortable with.

On the other hand every business you promote will be different. I have cliants that pay as little as 690/month all the way up to $3500.

Usually the higher paying cliants are in very competative niches and have alot of money. like lawyers. for $3500/month, they expect resaults and you have to deliver.

Only their main webpage on forst page of google is not enough, for this price I position 3-5 of their online properties on the first page.

To keep cliants happy you might have to create additional web properties and rank them high aswell.

So charge according to the work you will have to put in, the niche competition and your skill.

Hope this has helped.

Any more questions please ask.

Alem

Well, no suprise then... I mean...
I just read your site and I find amazing you charge people $199 for search engine Submission

mmmm is that SEO from the 90's ???
Come on dude... do you really call yourself an SEO professional and you charge people to submit to SEARCH engines?

I hope your customer don't read this

http://seobullshit.com/seo-myths-cra...earch-engines/


Amazing... god save us from these "SEO companies" flooding the Internet.

[Heidi Price]

Originally Posted by marketingweb

Hence why treating SEO as an afterthought is a bad idea, and why "build it once, build it right" is the key message, the whole site needs to be built with SEO in mind.....

Abso-bloody-lutely!

[JohnSheppard]

Originally Posted by marketingweb

Hence why treating SEO as an afterthought is a bad idea, and why "build it once, build it right" is the key message, the whole site needs to be built with SEO in mind, and why working with a designer such as Heidi Price (or humbly, myself) who "gets" SEO will get better results then treating it as an addon later once the site is built.

I see many seo people say this, but what are the hard things that you need to keep in mind when building a site? I mean the ones that can't be changed easily afterwards?

Content is easy to change, tags are easy to change? Does your markup quality count? That I could see as hard to change, Getting your CMS wrong, THAT is hard to change, but what else?

[marketingweb]

Hi JohnSheppard

I take your point that most things can be changed. To answer your questions though, it's probably best to mention some of the many many things I take into account SEO wise when I build a page. Probably giving away a list I should blog about this rather than just posting here as it's good stuff, but here goes off the top of my head.

1) Content written with both search engines and humans in mind
2) H1, H2 etc tags used to define the page structure (as they should be) rather than just to "make text bigger"
3) Title Tags and Meta Descriptions (easy to change though)
4) Alt tags on all images
5) SEO friendly URLs
6) Page structure to allow maximum text without compromising page look.
7) Page footers
8) Menu Structure & Design (ie text based links if possible)
9) Menu link texts
10) When using a CMS, ecommerce etc other things apply:
a) Permalinks structure
b) Avoiding duplicate content via multiple URLs to same content
c) Avoiding variables in URLS (eg osCommerce's osCid= string) OR ensuring rel=canonical header tag is set so ensure Google knows what the "real" URL of a page is.

And probably some more I've forgotten that I just do naturally without thinking.

SEO is about three things - on page content, on page structure, off page link quantity & quality (ie linkbuilding, link baiting etc).

The off page stuff you can do with any site. But based on my above list, how much of this is easy to change without basically rebuilding the entire site? For example, changing title and meta description tags is easy, but if this is all you consider to be onpage SEO, well, lets say it's just the "easy part" and leaning to put these in is about 1% of the way to becoming a genuine SEO specialist.

Adding alt tags on every image...easier to do up front but can be done later. Stuff like getting the menu and page structure right can involve changes that take as much work as rebuilding the site from scratch would. And then, say you change all of the page file names from say about.htm to about-freds-widgets.htm, you then have to put in a series of 301 redirects from old to new - all stuff that wouldn't have to be done if it was done right.

Given that in a lot of cases you would basically have to rebuild the entire site to get some of this stuff right, yet that isn't in the client's budget as they just want you to "SEO it", it means the basic things like title tags and mabye a H1 gets added in, and the rest gets left. With quality link building it's still possible to rank, but takes a lot more work in that area to make up for deficiences on the page itself.

Obviously the more complex a site and the more willing a client is to let you change things and invest the time/money, the more you can overcome it not being done right at the start. But most clients AND inexperienced SEO's are so convinced that "title tag + description tag + a heading tag + link building = SEO" that they don't appreciate the value of the rest - plus their idea of linkbuilding is ofter so bad that they fail in this area as well!

Matt