A common rant online is that SEO’s are too expensive, and are no good. I know many individuals and firms who provide search engine optimization services, and ther is an enormous range of quality between them. In this field, you get what you pay for – however paying exorbitant amounts does not necessarily equate to better results.
The most common problem of working with an SEO firm, is the company executive or slick salesman will sell you an optimization package, promise the world and show real world results. Then they stick an intern or inexperienced employee on your project and you aren’t getting the quality you are paying for.
While researching an SEO firm it is best to ask a lot of questions to determine the experience level of the people who will be working your site.
Questons For Your SEO Provider:
- Who exactly will be working on my site
- Have you spoken at industry events
- How many years experience does the person working on my site have
- Are you a member of any ratings organizations such as seoconsultants.com
- Review examples of several current site rankings for competitive keywords
- Can you do css or web programming
Asking the right questions can help determine the economics of an SEO job.Hiring an individual SEO or an extremely small company will generally return much better results, but the price could be higher. The benefit of using a respected individual SEO is the knowledge base and massive amount of experience.
SEO Consulting Costs:
- Hourly consulting: $150-1000/hr
- Project rates $3,000-50,000
- Monthly maintenance $300-10,000
When looking for a quality SEO firm I recommend starting with quality directories. SEOconsultants, Marketing Sherpa and SEMPO offer peer reviewed listings of search marketing firms who have a good track record. Rand (who is at the upper end of the fee schedule) offers some analysis of SEO consultants fees as they relate to economics and market fluctuation.
3 Responses
Yes but now that you own your own SEO firm wouldn’t you say your search engine knowledge is vastly superior and worth a commensurate rate increase as well?
In essence, you can now honestly bill xxx.xx/hr where the previous multi national corporation was most likely billing you out at the same rate or higher.
Actually before owning my onw cosulting firm, there were many instances at a Notable Google Enterprise partner where I was an intern performing billable SEO and PPC work for a notable trans-national clientele requesting to purchase an SEO package ofered.
It resulted in positive results none the less.
So who said interns can’t perform serious SEO work?
Thanks Cayley
This site was great and all the info on the blog
SEOmoz is hilarious.
I am concerned about your 1-man team a availibility, though.