It makes sense.
If I were looking for an SEO, I would want an “affordable SEO” package since I don’t know what I’m buying.
Despite SEO being more than 11 years old in it’s current iteration with Google being the primary search engine for all of us to optimize for, it’s still a relatively new field. Imagine if you turned back time and it was the 11th or even 12th year of medical science or maybe even the legal industry. Either field would be in it’s infancy and there would be a lack of standards. Some “professionals” would be considered potentially scam artists and the pricing standards would also be all over the board. Well, welcome to the SEO industry here in circa 2011 and you have have the same issues as you did in history for very established and mature fields today.
So, what is SEO worth?
SEOMoz wrote a great post about the potential pricing and costs of SEO here. They also wrote a post here in January of 2011 estimating the salaries of people in the SEO industry. However, are these the true figures that are represented out in society? I know that two local firms charge quite a bit for services. There’s distilled which charges a minimum of $5000/month for their clients. They’re great folks and do a great job and I guess this is why they can command such high rates. Then there is PointIt which does great work managing PPC campaigns. They charge a minimum of $2000/month to manage their clients’ Pay per Click campaigns.
How much do we charge? Well, it depends. We have less expensive packages to the more expensive ones. However, regardless of what we do, we make sure our clients at least get the basic aspects that will give them the full benefit. Even the basic packages have successfully helped every client we’ve helped increase their traffic anywhere from 30 to over 200% year over year minus one.
However, if your site is larger, our packages are a bit more pricier. There is simply more work to be done and we may be fighting a huge battle on the link building front. Frankly, for our larger clients, there is a custom price which can be as high as $100,000 a month and this excludes any PPC costs. Is this affordable SEO? Well, if it gives you 100:1 in ROI, it’s definitely affordable.
