Search Engine Optimization has been described as an art, a science, a practice, an abomination and a career by those in and around the industry. But, to most outsiders learning about the practice for the first time, SEO is primarily seen as a service that professionals provide to clients. Although I'm often in the professional seat, I have become a client of many well known SEOs and secondary providers of services like link building, promotion, press releases and the like. I've also become familiar with how many SEOs ply their trade and what constitutes a "typical" contract in the business.
The focus of direct SEO work is to raise a sites's overall rankings in the major search engines for search terms and phrases that will bring them targeted visitors they can then convert into customers (whether customers actually means buyers or simply statistics to show to advertisers is beside the point). This brings to mind many questions that folks searching for a provider are sure to ask:
- What services should I request from a professional SEO?
- When I buy SEO consultation, what difference will I see between a $1000 spend and a $10,000 spend?
- Are the big names in the industry really worth extra money?
- How do I know if I need a "hands-on" SEO or just a consultant?
I'm going to attempt to answer each of these, one at a time.
What services should I request from a professional SEO?
The first thing you should request if you're not an SEO yourself (and therefore familiar with exactly what you need) is a review of your existing site. This review should be comprehensive and touch on items such as the coding of your pages, the site's URLs, the link structure and the current promotional/marketing efforts. A competent SEO may charge quite a bit for this service (between $300 - at the low end of the spectrum - up to $5000 or even $10,000 from a high profile SEO or a very large, complex site).
After this initial report has landed on your desk, you can decide if you or your staff can handle all the elements recommended for improvement or whether you need the professional's help to accomplish these tasks. The rates you can expect to pay by the hour range from $50 to $350. A very high quality SEO typically charges a high hourly rate because their ability to make money working on their own sites is so high. It's natural to think of SEO consulting or work time as an opportunity cost - any paid work for a client is going to pull away time that could be spent in other areas. If the professional can make $100-$1000 per hour working for themselves, that opportunity cost will be high.
An excellent way to think of an SEO professional's time is to think of them as a professional service provider similiar to a lawyer or an accountant. The obtuse rules and regulations surrounding case law or financial document preparation are actually quite similiar to the confines of the web search space, and while formal education in SEO doesn't exist yet, it is no less neccessary to the success of a business (and may, in fact, be much greater in terms of ROI than attorney or accountant fees).
When I buy SEO consultation, what difference will I see between a $1000 spend and a $10,000 spend?
SEO consultation is the most visible way to see the price difference between SEOs. While a newbie SEO might charge you $50 an hour for 20 hours of work, an experienced, well-known professional (like those I've mentioned before) might cost upwards of $200 or $300 for the same 20 hours. The difference between the two is primarily value. The value of 20 hours of someone who's worked in SEO for several years and has produced high-performing campaigns, spoken at SEO/M conferences and is respected by peers and clients for their abilities has a clear edge.
Specifically, the types of things covered by a $300/hr SEO that might be missed by a $50/hr SEO include:
- Highly accurate prognostications on the site's performance over the short and long term based on the content, links and work performed
- An almost "unnatural" sense of the best links to buy, cajole, rent or attain and how to do it (with money, content, e-mails, phone calls, trades, press, etc.)
- A deep understanding of issues outside of SEO that are exceptionally important to your website's performance - professional design (and presentation), usability, marketing, legal issues, etc.
- Relationships with websites, content providers and other industry professionals who can provide services (links + content) that can help the site succeed in the SERPs
- Experience with technical, spidering, canonical, penalty and other issues that may be affecting performance
There are certainly bargains to be had in the field of SEO consulting and work, but if you run a large website, the pricing you should expect is commensurate with the value you receive. And, luckily, the community is open and public enough (through the forums, blogs and conferences) that karmic retribution for deeds good or bad are bound to come out.
Are the big names in the industry really worth extra money?
The "big names" typically include a list of several dozen well-known, well-respected companies and individuals. At the current time, it's happily rare to hear a horror story from a client of any of these companies, largely due to transparency of work, trust in SEO relationships and the pride these "big names" take in their work and their reputation. SEO is also such a high ROI field for most companies that even a mediocre job can bring stellar results.
If you contract a "big name" SEO to do work for your site, you can expect consistently high quality and generally exceptional work. There are certainly exceptions to the rule, and you should certainly pursue investigation on whomever you're thinking about hiring. This is easily accomplished by searching for the persons name and SEO - for example, in this search for Rand Fishkin and SEO.
How do I know if I need a "hands-on" SEO or just a consultant?
You will know by looking at the recommendations made a professional SEO consultant and walking through each of the items suggested. If your IT or webdev team can handle the work, you can probably operate with a consultant on retainer, providing advice over e-mail and phone as neccessary. If, however, the list of recommendations includes work outside the scope of your internal team's abilities (most often in the fields of link building, marketing, promotion and even link-attracting content creation), it is almost certainly well worth your while to add outsource the work. Your SEO consultant should be able to do this for you, or refer you to high quality providers to help (they'll often manage these providers privately, making the contract much smoother for you).
I hope that all this advice has been helpful to those seeking SEO work, as well as those starting work in the field who may have questions about its operations. Please leave comments or questions below. I'd enjoy hearing whether folks consider my figures, in particular, to be accurate.
I'm way late to this conversation, but still new to SEO. While some of the details of this post may be outdated, I find it useful, and a good ancillary to Rand's only fairly most recent post on SEO pricing. There are high-touch, high-concept elements to SEO just as there are to any business, and in part, the way you price will be reflected in your own standards. Connecting the dots in terms of branding, design, architecture, conversion, and additional technical SEO are foundational in providing value to your clients.
Rand, the problem is not as simple as justifying whether a fee is high or low to the Internet savvy, it can be much more complicated than that. And of course it’s not only the time you bill them for. How do you justify the cost of doing things professionally, properly and with integrity, not just the fee but the entire cost, to people who are ignorant of the issues and simply don't understand what you are trying to do for them, how complicated it is, to do correctly, and how much time it takes? Especially when there are so many goobers out there copying how we market and offering what looks like, to these people, the very same thing for a fiver. Well, maybe not a fiver, but you get where I am coming from.
This is one of my biggest problems because at Social Strategy I try and help the type of organisations who make a positive contribution to society ~ not ones who just want to sell more stuff to more people ~ and they are typically not staffed by people who have had a great deal of experience in marketing anything on the Internet, or at least not successful.
They don’t understand the dangers and often don’t find out until it’s too late, their website has no visitors, no sales, they’ve spent their money and they’ve been goobered!
This is not entirely self-interest. I genuinely want to stop them wasting their money, no matter how little, and find themselves a year or so down the road with their site sandboxed or even works de-indexed by Google, and they have to start again with a new domain. All because of a super whizzo traffic generating trick, which was “killing it”, installed by some knucklehead who sold it to them as the latest way to be successful online. Or even worse, he didn’t even tell them about it and just did it as a short cut.
Go get a lawyer, buy a plane ticket to Manila, try and find him then, when the S H 1 T hits the fan.
I appreciate what you’ve written here so far, Rand, but give me some words (or anyone else for that matter), to give them, and help them to see you really can’t expect to pay rock bottom prices and risk doing yourself anything but harm. Especially when you deal with people who don’t have a reputation to lose.
The term “SEO is not an exact science” is using by Search Engines Marketers who do not fully understand how search engines works. Read the proof at:
https://blog.acroterion.ca/usability-and-searc...
Excellent article.
I currently run an SEO firm in Los Angeles and have had good success (#1 on MSN for Los Angeles SEO, 6 on Yahoo, and other terms)but while I ran SEO for Disney Internet Group I dealt with a number of the top firms. Some were excellent and some were dissapointing. I found that working with one qualified SEO, myself, worked wellfor the company, as I could match what the larger firms were doing. I have also worked with other consultants who provided me with better results than the large firms. It is a give and take.
Going on an hourly basis is, in my opinion, only good if the amount of work necessary is small. For large campaigns I believe in a campaign fee which includes follow up, maintenance, consistent modifications and re-optimization to get the site to the top. It is not an optimize 1 time game.
Again though I agree with your article and am looking forward to more from you.
Thanks and warm regards,
Jeff Chance --Removed Promotional Info; You're welcome to post this in your user profile--
You sort of get what you pay for. I have low overheads and low running costs due to my situation (just me and Wit the cat) so i am able to give a lower price than most people with my skillset. For the lower price i charge a client would get much more than they would from paying a corporate company and would actually get someone that is prepared to give them the full service and dedication that a corporate company never could. I consider myself very cheap at $160 per hour.
Although i may have to raise my prices due to my impending purchase of a dog (Chihuahua) that i am going to call Randfish.
Social media optimization is another form of Web marketing like pay-per-click optimization, like banner advertising, like newsletter distribution, etc. People need to stop blurring their distinctions between social media and search media. Search media requires a set of very different rules and guidelines. People do try to leverage social media to obtain competitive search rankings but that’s just linking and there are competitive linking methodologies. Linking, as I have often pointed out, is not search engine optimization, it’s linking.
Since I recently found great documentation of possibly bypassing the Sandbox filter I might be able to finally raise my $90 hourly rate (No overhead here) so I can show more SEO references, instead of having to wait in 6 month spurts to display my current clients SEO results.