How do you charge for SEO?

Hi pros,

I've been approached by a company to perform some SEO for their site and we've agreed on the pharse to target. I want to draw up some kind of contract so that we both know what we're getting.

I was wondering, how do you normally approach this? Do you say for example "For £1000 I'll get your site listed on the 1st page of google for the phrase 'XYZ'"

or "For 1st place in Google I'll charge £1000, for every place below deduct £40"

I honestly don't know what the best way to do it would be so that a) it gives me enough time to get their site onto the first page and b) I can cover what happens if I don't meet the target in the specified time.

Also, do you usually ask for 50% upfront, and 50% upon completion? (for example)

Just wondering, how do you normally approach it?

I'd steer clear of any page-based or SERP-based pay system. It could result in you never getting paid due to factors you have absolutely no control over. For example, John Doe has a site that is 1 week old on a brand-new domain with zero BL. You SEO the site, but Google has it sandboxed for 8 months. You've spend 100 hours doing SEO work on the site and the result is you spend 100 hours, but due to the sandbox, the domain is not on the first page and not #1... so you get nothing for your work.

Generally, I'd do a consultation (analyze and report or just discuss) for an hourly rate. Maybe $100/hour or more (if you're good, that's well worth it).

If you do a service charge where you know what the bill will be in the beginning, it's completely up to you to charge a partial fee then the rest after.

But stay away from SERP-based rates (especially in Google).

What we do most of the times is charge a fee just for optimizing the site, and i don't mean getting links etc. But just do the regular stuff.
Then we dive in to the rest of the work which takes patience and charge this when results are showing up.

We never make appointments about nr 1 spots cause it differs a little from time to time. We look at the difficulty of the keywords and then say ok to get you listed in the top 5 we will charge you a certain amount if your position will be 6 to 10 we will deduct 10%.

And i wish i could charge by the hour and don't make any appointments up front but most of the time customers don't go for that (i wouldn't)

You should charge for the time you spend on their site regardless of any results.

Normally it is better to buy permanent links than to waste a SEO's time getting them manually.

Thanks for the replies. It seems selling my time is the way forward, I'd feel more comfortable doing that.

Soroja, who do you buy permanent links from?

There are several directories that offers permanent links and there is a huge potential in personal blogs and homepages that are somewhat on topic. E.g. if you are doing SEO for a restaurant then you might suggest to them that they dig up every personal home page and blog about cooking and offer $20 for a permanent link on their home page. They should not waste the SEO's time with link getting, it is almost like washing the floors in store bought water.

Remember, most people has never made a dime of their personal homepage.

Thanks sorvoja. That's a good suggestion, thanks.

So now my next question, how do you charge the client for these links? I mean, you're technically spending your clients money getting these links, so how do you charge them? In advance, or just invoice them?

It is better for your client to have someone other than you getting the links. It is a waste of resources having a SEO do the link building. If you really want to do this then you should charge the cost of the links + your time. In Norway it is very inpolity to charge in advance, it is common to wait for some time and until all work is completed before sending out the invoice. Most likely your time will eat up most of the link building budget. Explain to them what needs to be done and let them hire a 15-16 year old high school student to do the link getting, this leaves you free to do the real SEO work.

BTW big-bad-burrow there is something very familiar with your avatar, I got the strange feeling that I have seen you before. You would not happen to be a member of NMLRA?

Thanks for all the info sorvoja, most insightful.

You probably have seen my avatar before, it's George Costanza from Seinfeld (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004517/)

Trust me, it's confused a few people - I'm only 23! I've got a bit more hair than George.

The company that im starting to work for arranges contracts on a percentage of increase in business. So if we raise online revenue from 20,000 to 40,000 we take a cut of the 20,000.

That has worked very well for them

Damb burrow.
I thought you would know better.
Just charge them $19 and be done with it.

So if you are gunna charge $1000 then i want you to get me in the top 10 for debt consolidation.
Any position below in the top ten i will minus $40 off.
If you dont get me in the top 10 i wont pay you anything.
OK?

It's easy to charge for on-page seo, either project-based a few 1000 or by the hour. Can you charge for off-page seo? Dunno, I charge em for the advice only, buy a link here and there. Get an ad at this site and so on.

Companies that charge based on results are almost always at least in the 'grey' area.

ha ha!

I refuse to take criticism from the man who asked 'what is a seo pro'?

I worked out what an seo pro was.
Someone who gets other peoples sites banned as opposed to a `seo` who gets their own sites banned.

I work for a company that does very well with page1 result-based seo. If you're good, index many different and limit your work to specific terms, this is easy and profitable. However, if you have very general terms that cannot be localized, it's damn near impossible. It all depends on the client. Do they sell bicycles nation-wide, or do they sell bicycle seats in Cincinnati, Ohio? If it's very specific and very local, you should be able to get them on page one for "most" search engines. Otherwise perhaps you should consider a career change.

So why not write up a new contract / work order for each client, and change your terms depending on what works best for you at the time?