PRICING SEO PROPOSALS

 Anyone who has been in this business more than a week can attest to the difficulty found when writing a proposal or pricing a project.  What should I charge?  It is nearly impossible to estimate how long certain tasks may take especially since there are so many variables that exist with SEO.  In addition, these services hold different values for everyone.  One individual may feel that $6,000 is worth all of the additional traffic, conversions, and online presence.  Others may not. Or perhaps you have failed to show them the value in it.  Whatever the case may be I have seen the shock on the clients face one too many times to not yearn for a new method. 

Pricing SEO proposals can be a rather unpleasant experience if the customer is not at least familiar with pricing up front.  Personally I have decided that if the customer does not seem to be familiar with SEO pricing, I am going to assign him/her homework; to look up  the going rate for SEO services and get familiar with the very wide ranges of pricing everywhere on the internet from $50.00 and hour to $200.00 an hour.   Then we might have something to talk about, like what they can afford and what to them is “reasonable.”  It may also place a bit more value on the work that we do.  Let’s face it, this knowledge can turn a mediocre business into a thriving money maker.  So the value in SEO is truthfully well beyond even the highest priced proposal found anywhere as long as you deliver what you promise in the time frames stated. 

Equally difficult is predicting how many hours various tasks will take you up front.  With the plethora of variables that can occur in any one service of SEO,  what you thought may take 10 hours may end up taking you 20 or maybe just 4 hours.  If we give ourselves some leway in the initial pricing, although hours may be lost here and there, it can help to minimize the loss.   It is always a pleasure to have the client who understands those variables and hourly pricing but most small businesses want to know up front how much they are spending and understandably so.  Any wavering of that intial price can send shockwaves through the entire project.

If possible giving a range of hours may work best and maybe adding a “not to exceed” x amount of hours to cover yourself should the task take longer that you proposed intially and to ease the small business owner’s fear that things could “get out of hand”. 

Since I haven’t yet had a chance to try these new pricing methods I am not sure how effective they may or may not be.  Being that my pricing is at the lowest end of the wide range; what have I got to lose, besides a customer that cannot afford SEO services? It appears that was never mine to begin with.