SEO Services Pricing

[MarcThai]

I've looked all over the forums here but can't see anything about pricing SEO services. I've stayed with the same price for about 10 years (www.holtww.com/seo.shtml). Is it time to increase my fees? Looking at other SEO service providers on the web, there seems to be a wide variety of fees, and yet most of them offer much the same service.

Has anyone ever sat down and worked out what it actually costs to do a regular SEO service, including setting up meta tags, checking code compliance with W3C, registering with the SE's, finding relevant reciprocal links, and advising on marketing, etc?

I've seen prices ranging from about $US250 up to $5,000 per month. Yet the list of services is almost identical. I seriously doubt that the number of pages in a website would influence these fees, so how do you arrive at a reasonable fee?

[incrediblehelp]

How much is your (or companies time) time worth? Then you have your fee.

This is different for everyone. It is not like buying DVD players which are closely related in price.

What happens when you do SEO for a 4-5 page website that sells potato chips or one that sells 1000 products. Would you charge the same? Of course not. That is why Bronze, Siler, Gold Packages dont make sense to me.

[Steven1976a]

I think when considering your prices you would have to ask yourself a few questions.

Who are your customers?
I believe that small businesses who really dont understand the importance of SEO would be scared about paying a premium charge. Larger companies probably wouldnt care.

How has your pricing worked so far for SEO services? Has the pricing been attractive for your customers and do they come back year after year?

From living in Thailand myself I would say for local market that your prices are acceptable but I would expect more than you offer in your listed points.

[andyf]

SEO is wider concept and different companies may adopt it differently so the charges differ, you will have to choose a company which will fulfill your need.
check for the ranking of the company for different keywords to cross check it's SEO quality.

[Peter (IMC)]

In my experience the value of SEO services are different for every client. Also experience shows us that in most cases, the higher the value for the client, the more work it is for us.

We have some customers that we charge only $150 per month which is extremely low, but they have like 10 pages and are in an extremely specific niche which makes it very easy to obtain high rankings. So we don't need to charge a huge fee for this type of website, simply because it is not a lot of work.

Then there are other sites that have much higher requirements with many pages, higher requirements in relation to site structure optimization, internal link optimization, considerable amount of keyword research, website promotion (we do not like to call it link building as website promotion goes much further and has better results), etc. etc. These types of websites we charge considerably higher fees. Obviously for these types of clients the results of our work represents a much higher dollar value as well.

[incrediblehelp]

In my experience the value of SEO services are different for every client.

Boy isnt that the truth!

[Peter (IMC)]

In my experience the value of SEO services are different for every client.

Boy isnt that the truth!

Very much and it means having to investigate every potential client to understand what they are likely to expect.

A flat fee results in just one type of client being interested in the services. Smaller companies won't be able to afford it while much bigger companies are likely to believe the services aren't that good or simply not the right services for them because it is not in their expected price range.