After my bitch about cheap SEOs I thought I should follow up with a post on how much SEOs should charge. Not that I actually have an answer to this as I find the cost of a decent SEO can vary dramatically depending on the situation.
I guess the correct answer should be it is not what the SEO charges but the ROI the client sees. Unfortunately that doesn’t really help answer the question unless work for a profit share rather than hourly/daily rates.
From my experience I have see clients expect to pay a one of fee of £200 and want to rank for hundred of generic competitive terms. I have also had clients happy to pay £1-2k per month and I strangely suspect they would of been happier to go much higher. Obviously the first example is just ridiculous and the client is either seriously tight fisted or completely mis-informed about SEO. If I could rank a site for hundred of competitive terms for that price I wouldn’t work for clients and just run hundred of my own sites out of my luxury New York penthouse. On the other hand it is quite easy to screw yourself out of good money by undercharging in order to guarantee work.
I also find by under charging you run the risk of sabotaging your own work. If you have 20 days worth of clients and you are undercharging it is very tempting to charge them the same, do less work per month on them, and maybe even take shortcuts so you can take on more clients. This can then lead to the client site not performing as well as it should or worse case scenario you take a shortcut and get penalised by Google.
Unfortunately for newer or smaller SEO companies it can be hard to win clients if you charge a bit too much. Companies like BigMouth probably can charge whatever they want as they have built that reputation and brand. However if I created Yossarian the amazing SEO company Ltd and quote £1k a month to a client and they then get a quote for £150 a month from a cheap (shit) SEO it is quite likely they will go with the cheaper SEO.
Randfish from SEOMOZ did the most thorough post of pricing that I could find. He created the following table to summarise some example prices:
|
Service |
Low End |
Mid Range |
High End |
| Site Review + Consulting | $500 | $2,500 | $10,000 |
| Hands-On Editing of Pages/Code | $2,000 | $10,000 | $50,000 |
| Manual Link Building Campaign | $500 | $5,000 | $20,000 |
| 1-Day SEO Training Seminar | $750 | $4,000 | $12,000 |
| Keyword Research Package | $100 | $500 | $2,000 |
| Viral Content Development + Mktg | $1,000 | $7,500 | $20,000 |
| Web Design, Development + Mktg | $5,000 | $25,000 | $100K+ |
| Monthly Retainer for Ongoing SEO | $2,500 | $7,500 | $20,000+ |
Personally I think these prices look a bit expensive for the UK market and I think they may represent the more mature American market. It also largely depends on the exact work done. A monthly retainer on $7,500 is probably steep if you only do 2 working days per month, however if that represent 10 days work they it is probably very cheap.
The other influencing factor I have found with SEO is the your company itself. When I was a one man band charging £300-400 a day was ok as I had little outgoings and only myself to pay. When you take on staff, get an office, advertising etc the prices go up dramatically. The biggest factor of increased outgoings are staff and more importantly the members of staff that are required to run the business but don’t actually do the SEO or Web design that is being charged for. So if you have a sales team / account managers / secretaries etc they can make a large impact on what you NEED to charge to survive and without them you wouldn’t land new clients or the company would just fall apart from being so un-organized.
Another problem with undercharging / cheap SEO services is that I don’t see how it is a sustainable business model. Yes ok you can charge £100 a month and outsource that work to some Indian, but in order to earn a decent wage you need dozens if not hundreds of clients and I assume the retention ratio of clients must be poor so you need to be finding clients all the time! You then end up spending more money on sales people to cold call companies trying to win new clients all the time. Surely it is better to charge £500+ a day and keep the client numbers down and perform a good job on them all? I would say 90-95% of the clients I have worked on stay on an SEO campaign for at least 6 months. The other 5-10% tend to be idiots that pay for the first month then cancel the service or just cancel their cheque’s in some cases. So therefore to maintain the current turnover I would say we would need to sign a couple of new clients a month at the very most, and I doubt we would even need to do that as I have not seen our growth level out yet.
So anyway what does everyone else charge? I personally have risen my day rates from around £500 to somewhere between £600-800. Not actually decided the specifics again, and it does vary depending what actually needs to be done per month.
