Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have to echo what others are saying, just to be honest with you - even most decent consultants I know have minimums of about $1,500/month for retainer work. Most agencies won't deal with anything below $2,500/month (here in the US). You could work with a freelancer (domestic or overseas) and get a decent chunk of hours for $500/month, but you'd be talking about a lower level of experience. If you can segment what you want and really lay out projects, I think that's fine. If you need someone to tell you what you should be doing and guide the process, it's going to be a lot tougher. We do have a recently updated recommended list, but many of the firms are higher-priced: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended I think that Portent Interactive out of Seattle does reasonably priced audits (starting in the $1,500 range) - that might be a good starting point, as @Nakul said. Spend your first 3 months of budget on a solid site audit, figure out where your gaps are, and then go from there. You can do some of the initial work yourself and then hire a freelancer/contractor to do some small-scale projects based on what the audit found.

We also only do custom 'packages' as no one package is going to work for our different client needs and budgets- we work on an hourly charge out and set up a strategy to be worked through. We find that a lot of our competitors who offer packages offer really unattainable / unreasonable promises, rather than try to grab part of that market we make a point of being and working differently and that's what our clients like about us. On how much to charge, how long will it take to do xxx, what's the hourly rate you need to charge to cover costs etc... And that should be a reasonable amount. Your costs may not be competitive, we cant do 80hr for $2000 which is what some of our direct competitors offer- so we stick to what we do well and work on making that market bigger. Maybe sell 'no packages' as your quality point of difference.

I'm a small business owner who managed to get lost down the SEO rabbit hole a few years ago on another forum. Since then I have learned so much that I do spurts of intense study for a few months then leave it alone for a year.  I then come back to learn all the new and exiting changes that are constantly going on. What I do find odd is that in my experience 99.99% of the SEO "experts" who call my business and try to sell me a product or service fail so miserably that I just shake my head & then go back to my own learning instead of paying someone else to do the work for me. I understand that lots of people who are new will ask the same new questions, I sure did. If they are asking the wrong ones a two fold approach might help. a. Answer the question. b. Guide them to the proper questions with examples of why another method of thinking might be important.

Have you seen the 'business case' template files that Econsultancy have? They have one for SEO specifically... Maybe a help? (Although it is from 2010 it seems! So maybe update any stats!) http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/sem-search-engine-optimisation-seo-business-case It does cost though, unless you or anyone in your company has a membership there? Personally, I find that working out some basic figures on traffic increases with existing, and forecast conversion rates can help. In addition, do you track what the leading competing brand is doing? I sometimes find that whilst some folks further up the food chain will be convinced by the figures and stats, others will be convinced by seeing that their leading competitor is spending on SEO (this can be proved by measuring various metrics, checking out their social profiles, etc). I guess nobody wants to be the last kid in the playground chosen for the team? <-- Even with this though, having some stats on projected ROI is a very good idea, and yup, as Promoteam said above... presentation matters!

You've certainly got some excellent SEO conferences in your list there Nakul. Have you ever thought about crossing the pond? Here in the UK we have some great conferences and this year is the first year of the ionSearch SEO conference in Leeds. Link love - 30th March / London Brighton SEO - 13th April / Brighton ionSearch -18th April / Leeds SAScon - 17th - 18th May / Manchester

That's very exciting! I will be purchasing a copy. I never purchased/read the 1st edition but I've found Danny Dover's SEO Secrets excellent - so helpful and heard equally good reviews about "Art of SEO". Time to pre-order from Amazon!

Sounds almost like they'll take all current SEO factors and wipe them - focusing almost purely on links. Eg title tags no longer important.

Check out our SEOmoz LinkedIn Group. People add job listings all the time, and I'm pretty good at keeping it updated.

Hello Keri, Thank you for your response. Keri I totally agree that this is really subjective stuff. I just wanted to know what conversion rates - SEOs in our community here generally achieved in say 6 months time. And generally, what percentage of over all visits for your clients is made up of SEO visits (both organic and social). So... can you tell me what conversion rate you generally achieve in 3 months and 6 months for a client and what percentage of overall visits do SEO visits make by the 3rd and 6th month. This info will be very helpful for me in the sense that I will take ur experience and myown experience into consideration and with a possible coonversion rate in mind (which I will decrease to be on the safe side) I would be able to give a very rough forecast to the client. I do appreciate your inpur Keri... thanks again... and thanks for the link... I have learnt from it and it is great. take care Cheers

it is automatic. thanks. see above reply.

I see quite a bit of flux in the Google.com SERPs that I watch closely.  In retail areas I attribute some of it to the expiration of paid links for the Christmas buying season.  But, overall there is a lot of flux. Keep in mind that Google is always running test algos and we could be seeing a lot of them. Everyone knows that google is experimenting with their Panda updates.  Just recently they preached at free hosting to dump spammy sites.  I speculate that they are struggling with their arrows coming down on scrapers and quality which are difficult for their algo to separate.

Cheers Mate - Will take a look. Thanks

Thank You looks like my web designers have a whole new ball game to learn about if we want our content to show better on search results. Thanks for all your help!

With pleasure! Glad I could help.

I think you can still get a wide range of links whilst keeping it relevant. Here's a theoretical example for the topic of back pain - A backlink from a .edu or .gov site will have high authority. Some SEO's have targeted just getting links from these types of sites just because they have a high PR (Not neccesarily .edu or .gov, but I'll use these for the sake of this example) With the panda update it's been suggested this isn't going to be enough anymore (other people's suggestions, I have no data to support this). As a result you may need a variety, but still relevant set of links. For example A backlink from a blog talking about casey stoners back injury from a high authority racing blog could be relevant A backlink from a blog from a worried mother who's son is at university with back problems. A backlink from a walking society website on content relating improper footwear to back pain etc etc

Hi Steve, If you are using HTML5 you can use the follwing link "Positioning with Geolocation", and you can obtain the users latitude and longitude information. based on the latitude and longitude information you can write your code to open that specific site.