After working with over 150 individual business owners over the last 12 months and dealing, discussing and comparing notes with dozens of different SEO companies and referring many customers and clients to more suitable SEO services for their budgets, I have a fairly firm grasp upon the different pricing structures and and outright costs associated with different levels of SEO campaign.
What an SEO campaign should cost is a really difficult question, and is scattered with a number of if, ands and buts. Firstly there are a number of different pricing models which should be discussed:
Hourly Consulting:
Very simply the client is charged an hourly rate for their SEO work, usually comprised of an SEO consultants time – who is responsible for strategy, research and campaign direction an onsite optimiser who is responsible for making changes to your website for SEO effectiveness, a copyrighter who will generate new content for your site and 3rd party sites to assist in the SEO campaign and a link builder who is responsible for placing links to your site on a varying number of external websites.
SEO Consultant: $120-$1000/hr
On Site Optimiser: $40-$135/hr
Copy Writer: 1-20 cents/word
Off Site Optimiser: $3-$45/hr
Project Consulting:
Similar to the model employed by most web agencies and traditional marketing outfits, the SEO Company will charge a flat fee which is based on a projection of the time and components required for a successful SEO campaign. At Zen Net Solutions, we employ this SEO price model for a Setup Campaign; including Goal Setting, Site Review, Keyword research and onsite optimisation training.
Outcome Based Services:
A large number of second and third tier SEO Consultants offer a dozens of individual services usually associated with the offsite link building component of SEO. Such campaigns usually employ the submission or creation of a set number links back to the client site for a fixed price. The consultant will usually employ an automated tool or cheap outsourced labour to complete the given task. Many tier 1 SEO firms outsource components of client campaigns in this manor to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Profit Sharing:
A limited number of SEO Companies (however increasing everyday) are confident enough in their SEO skills to be rewarded by a percentage of incremental profit generated by a clients website. The primary issue with this model for SEO organisations is that some business back end operations are not as efficient or effective as they could be and consequently waste a proportion of the traffic generated by the the SEO company.
Cost Per Acquisition:
Commonly refered to as CPA within the online marketing industry, there are an ever growing number of individuals who operate as outbound marketers for large companies resting upon the CPA revenue model. Large SEO firms have begun to embrace this concept (including ZNS) and are rewarded on a Cost Per Lead, or Cost Per Action model where they are paid a fixed amount for each call, email or referral that their efforts generate. For businesses who are interested in a high level SEO campaign however don’t have the setup cash this can be an effective option to begin your foray into the online market.
Monthly Pricing:
The most common structure for SEO campaigns and another offered by ZNS – clients are assigned a campaign level (often basic, premium, gold etc) which attracts a monthly fee for which a certain number of actions are undertaken monthly. This is an ideal campaign structure for firms who are dealing with entry level clients, or those looking to build long term revenue streams.
Pay for Rankings:
This is a new model that is being increasingly offered by SEO firms, they utilize a formula to calculate the difficulty and scope of work required to rank a client progressively into the top end of Search Engine Rankings, and a fee structure to remunarate their efforts. Usually the pricing model is split into seveal tiers:
30 – 20
20 – 15
15 – 10
10 – 6
6 – 3
3 – 1
The SEO firm is experientially rewarded for moving the clients ranks up the results, and is paid on a monthly basis while the results remain at or near the top.
At Zen Net Solutions we offer a limited number of pricing models based on what we believe will offer the best results for both the client and ourselves, primarily focusing on monthly subscriptions and CPA models.