Where to start with pricing and how to present what you will be doing to clients

[Brian-H]

People don't like unknowns so I've always found the price by hour doesn't have a good uptake. People want to know how much it is going to cost.

I'd say quote for the job and in the background work out how many hours it will take and therefore cost you for the job then add 20% as most times things don't go so smoothly and you don't want to lose out. Eventually you'll get more accurate at pricing.

[SeoSheikh]

So would you price for the full job or break it down into Phases? What would you include in your task list first?

Phase 1:

Competitor Analysis
Keyword Research
Check site for errors
Title Tags
H1's
Robot.txt
Canonicalization

Phase 2:

Content writing
Link building
Article submission
Social Media

Phase 3:

Maintenance ??

I'd be interested to know how other people set out their job tasks for seo on a clients project.

[GuillermoOrtiz]

Alex,

I am definitely not a fan of charging by the hour and instead outline from the beginning what a person will get for a set price. Since SEO is an ongoing effort, the cost is recurring on a monthly basis with tasks broken down into the appropriate phases as you have described. The challenge is pricing this recurring cost and managing the expectations of the client upfront. I've never had a problem with clients who understand the value of my services at the start and also had the proper expectations. As for organizing yourself with the phases, I would highly suggest writing down everything you could possibly do for a client from A-Z, and really taking the time to examine the tasks and break them up into phases accordingly. Hope this helps!

[Brian-H]

They don't need to know what you need to do in order to do their job. They need seo to complete the job so price either per month or a start-up fee and per month.

[SeoSheikh]

Thanks Guillermo, I'm actually creating my task sheet as we speak so I can then break it down into stages. I guess the main tasks for maintenance would be link building and content writing.

I'll create a post with my version when its done. Thanks again.

Alex

[EvolveCreative]

Phases work or you could sell things as packages. For example,

Keyword & Competitor Research - Price
Comprehensive Site Analysis - Price

50 pages of on-site optimization - Price

1 Premium Blog Article (700+ words) - higher price

1 Standard Blog Article (>500 words) - lower price

I usually estimate about an hour a page for on-site optimization. The comprehensive site analysis is based on how big the site is. Keyword & Competitor research is also based on how big the site is - I usually do about 20 hours though.

As for backlinking & social media - I never quote these up front. WAY too complicated and it requires that your client REALLY trusts you because hourly is really the only way to price this. Pricing per link will come back and bite you in the rear... trust me.

[SeoSheikh]

Thats great thanks David. WHat would you include in your Comprehensive Site Analysis? Something similar to Danny Dovers?

[EvolveCreative]

Yup. Specifically,

• Registration with search engine's webmaster tools
• Registration with analytics
• Visitor review if analytics are available
• Google webmaster tools error report repair
• General content review
• Robots.txt review
• User experience review
• Canonicalization review
• Server response code review
• XML sitemap submission
• HTML sitemap optimization
• Footer optimization
• Main navigation menu optimization
• Duplicate content issues
• Crawl errors
• JavaScript / CSS / Flash optimization
• Internal linking review
• Optimization of search verticals (image search / news search / video search / etc.)
• Title tag optimization
• Meta description optimization
• Alt attribute optimization
• Header tag optimization (H1, H2, H3)
• Search engine friendly URL optimization

[SeoSheikh]

All this isn the first phase? Would you not break some of this up to be applied into the second phase? Unless of course the price reflects what is being done I guess.

[EvolveCreative]

Whoops, I should have taken out:

• Title tag optimization
• Meta description optimization
• Alt attribute optimization
• Header tag optimization (H1, H2, H3)

That is phase 2.

[SeoSheikh]

Ha.... that's better. Many thanks for your input David.

[SeoSheikh]

**"JavaScript / CSS / Flash **__optimisation" point is an interesting one. What would you be doing here? Is this to speed up the site load times or to correct things that make for a bad user experience within their site?