How to determine the scope of your SEO services and prices: 10 hints for an SEO beginner

1. How to determine the scope of your SEO
services and prices: 10 hints for an SEO
beginner
1. Take care to research the SEO and Web marketing niches – focus your attention on those
sparsely occupied. Make a competition analysis on search engines to single out professional
services with greater demand and lower competition. For example, if you have an IT background
and feel comfortable with the technical side of SEO, you can find your niche in offering such
services as optimization for sites built in a few popular CMS platforms or Adobe Flash. If careful
keyword research and SEO copywriting are your fortes, then you may offer this as your core
specialty.
2. Make a detailed task schedule setting the final and intermediate goals for every task. For
instance, if you write and submit press-releases, you will do this for link building (+50 new links
on Google) as an intermediate SEO objective and for reaching a top 10 position for a specific
keyword as a distant goal. Your benefit from this approach is obvious – your client will see
measurable goals, and in case a goal is not reached, you will more easily be able to separate your
responsibility for the work done from external circumstances (as a rule, too high competition),
and have a chance to elaborate a better plan to prevail.
3. Discuss with your customer the task schedule and conditions under which the goals are
considered achieved. The scope of your work and your responsibility should be mutually agreed
upon and approved by your customer in a written and legally binding form.
4. SEO services are result-oriented, but the results cannot be guaranteed 100%, because there are
a lot of circumstances beyond the SEO’s control. A professional SEO is always tempted to charge
for his work on an hourly basis similar to lawyers, auditors, and experts and consultants in many
other areas. Since you are a beginning SEO practitioner, and don’t have the weight and
reputation of a large SEO company behind you, you shouldn’t consider an hourly fee model. On
the other hand, limiting your professional potential with only fixed cheap SEO plans is also
unwise.

2. 5. Understanding in full the complexity of the SEO goals and not being able to guarantee a 100%
positive result, the following pricing strategy can be considered. After you analyze all the key
phrases for the project, it makes sense to divide the keyword list into a) low competition
keywords for which you can nearly guarantee top positions in the major search engines and b)
highly competitive keywords, for which top positions are unachievable in a short time and with
standard resources. The approach to low and highly competitive keywords’ optimization,
deliverables timeframes, and costs should be different. When your site enters the top 10 for the
less competitive keywords, your professional skills will become more credible with the customer,
so she will trust that getting top 10 for more competitive keywords just requires more time and
money.
6. On-the-page and site structure optimization prices should be based on the site size. Your time
and efforts, as well as competitive market prices should also be considered.
7. The cost of off-the-page optimization is more dependent on keyword competition, so you
may incur additional expenses. Many SEO companies include a basic off-the-page optimization
into their service plans, for instance, submission to search engines and directories, link exchange,
topic-relevant forum and blog posts, a few press-releases, etc. This standard service is enough for
less competitive key phrases, but definitely not enough for the highly competitive ones. This is
why it makes sense to divide the keywords by the effort and resources – time and money –
required to achieve a goal, and based on that, define the prices of off-the-page optimization for
the low competitive and highly competitive keywords separately.
8. In this way, you can clearly tell the basic mandatory optimization tasks (more or less fixed cost
for a client after the scope of work is agreed upon) apart from the less predictable and costly
off-the-page optimization works for the highly competitive keywords.
9. Cooperate with other professionals. If your customer wants you to do some tasks exceeding
your current competence, don’t try to do them if you are not sure of an excellent result. A better
solution is to get a competent professional involved in the project and complete all the work with
great results.

3. 10. As a rule, SEO companies offer a 6 to 12 month project delivery period. A well-done website
optimization has a long-term effect and doesn’t require costly ranking maintenance (with the
exception of highly competitive keyword optimization, where continual link-building is needed).
Don’t deceive your customer and foist a costly ranking maintenance plan that will only require
you to run automatic ranking reports and email them. A greater method of customer retention
is offering her some valuable further services such as Web analytics, keyword research and PPC
campaign optimization, landing page optimization, and so forth. Learn step by step, and extend
your SEO business!