How to Price an SEO Campaign

Here’s an excellent post I came across on the SEOmoz Blog by randfish. Trying to price out an SEO campaign for a client is not an easy task.

Delivering an accurate, reasonable price for your search marketing services is not an easy task. It requires that you pay attention to numerous factors that can affect the effort and time required to complete, along with internal and external market forces (i.e. How badly do you need the money? What do other SEOs charge?). Since this topic gets so little play around the industry discussion forums (as pricing is often kept under wraps), I thought it would be interesting to explore how we price projects and design quotes for a client. The following is a fictitious example, but it is accurate in both scope and actual numbers:

Let’s imagine that the creators of this website (www.explorethepearl.com) called SEOmoz and asked us what we could do to improve the traffic, reach, branding and search positions of their web property. In some cases, companies call with specific requirements, but for this case, (as it often happens in the real world), we’ll say that the client has asked us to construct a contract based on our opinion of what they need.

Current Homepage of ExplorethePearl

Here are the items I would include for a basic, consulting-style contract:

The deliverable would include 10 hours of my consultation time each month for 4.5 months and a single report, delivered 45 days after contract signing, containing the following elements:

Keyword Research & Recommendations (what keywords will pull in qualified traffic, how many searches do these terms/phrases get, how should keywords be used in the site to attract search traffic)
Review of Search Engine Friendliness Issues (URLs, KW Usage, Code, Internal Linking, Metadata, Sitemap Use, etc.)
Competitive Analysis (who’s currently chasing traffic for their terms or targeting the audience they want, what are these sites doing right or wrong)
Design, Usability & User Experience Suggestions (to help improve the way visitors perceive/use the site, and make it more attractive to the “Linkerati“)
Content Creation Suggestions (what kinds of content would be valuable to add to the site to attract additional traffic and convert existing users, are there potentials for “Linkbait“)
Link Acquisition Suggestions (a list of some great places to start requesting/buying/building links and ongoing strategies for a link campaign)
Recommendations for Avoiding Negative Search Engine Issues (duplicate content, URL canonicalization, re-direction of content - I note that they have multiple domains, etc.)

The total price for this package would be $30,000, paid as follows:

$7,500 down upon contract signing
$7,500 upon receipt of the report (45 days)
$5,000 30 days after report delivery
$5,000 60 days after report delivery
$5,000 90 days after report delivery

And here’s what I’d offer for a hands-on, SEOmoz-rebuilds-the-whole-site, type of proposal:

New Design for the Site (using CSS and some gorgeous graphics to help them accomplish the design-bait process)
Information Architecture (designing the content flow and wireframing the various site components - note, this would encompass the usabilty, user experience & design suggestions from above)
New Content Components (including, most likely, a blog, a more in-depth tour and many other items)
Construction of the site (Programming, CSS, CMS, domain canonicalization, etc.)
SEO & Keyword Targeting (Figuring out where and how to use relevant keywords to draw in search traffic, optimizing pages for search engines, etc.)
Public Relations (At launch of the new site, we’d help to spread the word to relevant press sources - local newspapers, bloggers, magazines, etc.)
Link Building & Linkbait (Helping the site to develop the links necessary to rank for their targeted keywords and attract additional, relevant referral traffic)
Analytics Installation, Training & Reporting (Even the best sites need constant tracking and improvement. I favor using Indextools, but any anlytics program that provides action tracking works - we install, train the marketing/web team and provide updated reports until the end of the consulting process)

The full project would require ~7 months of effort, followed by 3 months of additional consultation and assistance with implementing ongoing ideas/projects. Cost would be ~$120,000, payable as follows:

$20,000 down upon contract signing
$15,000 after 45 days
$15,000 upon launch of new site (ETA - 100 days)
$10,000 per month thereafter

Although the bulk of the work is done upfront (in both of the above scenarios), we like to help spread the cost over the entire contract, as it makes it more affordable and practical for our clients. And yes, this is what we’d really charge - I know you’re supposed to keep these numbers secret, but I’m not exactly sure why… We currently have multiple contracts with each of these formats in process and hopefully, we’ll be signing up more in the fall (as we’re fairly booked up at the moment).

I think a lot of folks are probably wondering how I arrived at these numbers. The best answer I can give is experience, but there are a lot of factors that go into the pricing, including:

Competitiveness of the Sector (some quick KW research and some KW Difficulty reports can help with this)
Size & Complexity of the Existing Site (or the site that’s to be built)
Outsourced Costs (we send nearly all our usability work to Kim Krause Berg, and a lot of other consulting, link building and research to Bill Slawski, so these prices figure into the cost)
Demand for our Services (i.e. 2 years ago, these prices would have been significantly lower, as we weren’t nearly as well-known back then)
Desire to Work with the Client (for clients that will be very difficult to work with, either due to personality issues, bureaucracy or, on the opposite side - existing friendship or excitement from SEOmoz’s staff to work on that particular site, the price can go up or down)
Estimated Time & Personnel Costs (SEOmoz spends quite a bit on labor, and we’re giving out raises in August, so this is our major variable)

I actually wrote this post based on the request of a blog suggestion. To whoever sent that in - excellent question! I hope this provides many of the answers you were seeking.

I’d love to hear your take - do you use additional pricing criteria? Do you think these prices are high, low, average? Why do you think so many firms choose not to provide accurate pricing data and examples on their sites?

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1233