SEO RoundTable Poll: Are SEO’s Worth $350 Per Hour?

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Sphinn It!

Went Hot: Jan 31, 2008 - 02:11 pm
Posted By: aimClear 532 Days ago
Source: http://www.seroundtable.com
Category: SEM

In response to recent posts and Sphinn threads,Rusty Brick is running a survey on SEM consultant pricing. Is ANY SEO worth $350 per hour with a 2000 hour minimum?

9 Comments

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Comments

from aimClear 532 Days ago #

Votes: 1

$350.00 is fine. Many SEOs are worth more. The 2000 hour minimum Barry re-mentioned in the SEORT Poll is CRAZY. We think high buck hourly based billing should only be for clients who are not under monthly contracts for 6+ months. Our monthly / annual contracts are not time based. They’re performance based. We charge a high hourly rate for short term consulting, with no minimum. Most SEO folks we know do...or should.

from NickWilsdon 532 Days ago #

Votes: 2

I agree with Marty, totally depends on the value they are creating. The number of 15-30% revenue share deals out there is testament to that. It’s not hard though to work out how well your SEO is doing. This is a bit trickier with SMO, as it tends to be focused more on traffic than conversions, but even then you should be able to set some goals. As we all know, internet marketing leads the marketing field in terms of R.O.I. analytics and performance tracking. The amount you pay as a company should be tied to these or you’re just running blind. As you suggest Marty, it’s also in the interests of the expert SEO to track their performance. This proves their value to the client and presents a clear case for increasing the budget.

from scottclark 532 Days ago #

Votes: 2

But guys - tell me this - if you are doing things performance based how do you prevent clients’ rank-and-file from polluting the effort? In every case I can remember the reason SEO efforts fail is because of clients undermining it. They weren’t being bad people, they just wouldn’t listen when I give them advice that (usually) radically changes their web presence. If I were paid based on performance, they’d be punching holes in my income.If you’re talking conversion performance, do you maintain total control over post-click activity? If you’re talking sales-based, how do you know if the market wants their product at all? What if they are inflexible on key components such as price, or won’t do new photography, or won’t change presentation of an offering?In the SEM world, I have to isolate and build landing pages that I control to get real performance. When I ask clients to integrate the learnings into the rest of the site, I usually get "but that’s ugly" or "but we need more ______" -- even as I hold the data in my hand.

from aimClear 532 Days ago #

Votes: 0

@ Scott: Minimum monthly payments seperate from ROI. Take several months "evaluation period" to determine audit procedure, viabilty for revenue sharning deal, possible in house rank and file trouble, etc...We’re just getting into ROI based fees. David over at ClixMarketing ONLY does ROI based fees for PPC, which is a pretty confident model.When I said based on performance, that ALSO means the value the services bring to the client...which does not have to be based on an actual ROI formula...rather a guestimate.We usually ask "what’s the annual gross/net of your company" when courting new clients.

from szetela 532 Days ago #

Votes: 1

As Marty mentioned, at Clix we only do ROI-based fees (and we only do PPC campaign management and conversion optimization). We think the "percentage of spend" model, like CPM pricing, is anachronistic and mainly rewards continual increase in spending without regard to profitability.Our clients love the ROI-based model, and it keeps us humping every day to improve clients’ ROI - and also employing technology developed in-house to boost conversions - like our dynamic landing page generation software (affectionately known as "Dynamo").This model also tends to make clients welcome our deep involvement in anything that affects conversions - e.g. landing page analysis and optimization, analytics, and shopping process optimization.

from scottclark 532 Days ago #

Votes: 1

@szetela so you must get pretty involved in the business model before committing. How would I, as an SEO or PPC mgr know that a new type of product or service is going to go well, even with perfect traffic and excellent visitor engagement. We know, on a current client, that they need badly to do a price sensitivity test to find where/if a tipping point exists. But the client refuses. So I’ve hit a wall - lots of top quality traffic on CTRs over 14% with tight matchtypes and good action oriented keywords in the tail. Sales suck. No idea if the pricing for their product is right or if a 20% reduction would make things go gangbusters. If I were paid on ROI, I’d be dead. This is not an unusual situation, even in PPC - I mean the equation of importance is always O(PR) > O(PRN) > O(CNN)O = Optimize PR = Product PRN = Presentation CNN = ChannelSo if the product fails, Optimization of the presentation and channel can’t make up.If there’s no water in the well, designing a better pump won’t matter.

from Feydakin 532 Days ago #

Votes: 0

The biggest problem I’ve had with performance based pay was under reporting of sales.. It’s amazing how many people will pick up the phone and order ove rthe phone rather than use the webstore.. What’s even more amazing is that so many people that answer the phone don’t see that as a "web sale".. They think that some magical fairly convinced them to call a random store 1500 miles away to order something.. It’s not a bad deal overall, but there are a lot of holes and ways it can be massaged like taxes..

from artarmani 531 Days ago #

Votes: 0

"It’s amazing how many people will pick up the phone and order ove rthe phone rather than use the webstore" I agree on that. One way to account for that is using a call tracking service like KeyMetric, but the client has to have the budget to afford that type of service to track calls coming from search.

from szetela 531 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Scott, with clients who are launching new businesses, or have no PPC history, we negotiate a flot fee deal and agree to revisit the compensation formula as soon as enough data has accumulated to derive one.We’ve encountered a few situations where we and the client concluded an ROI-based compensation scheme wouldn’t work for us, and amicably parted company - but the initial flat fee more than covered my costs.Feydakin, you’re right that phone sales are a challenge. In some cases we track them and get compensated. In others we write them off because we’re making such good money via commissions on directly trackable web sales.Basically the "squishier" the situation, the more often we add a flat fee at least up front, and/or negotiate a higher percentage of whatever metric we can measure as accurately as possible.