Whether you are just getting started offering SEO services or have been offering them for years, pricing is one of the biggest business challenges. Especially when the services require multiple tasks to meet client expectations.
You are in the right place if you are wondering how much to charge for SEO services. In this post, we’ll help you define your pricing strategy.
The first step is deciding which pricing model is best for your agency.
Pricing Models for SEO Services
When it comes to pricing, there are several models to consider. Note that not every model may fit into your agency’s best practices. So, let’s explore these in more detail before we dive into our recommended pricing method.
- Hourly: You bill an hourly rate for each hour worked. This is an easy-to-understand model, but it doesn’t create a predictable cost for the client and thus can be hard to sell. You are constantly estimating hours for projects, which slows down the sales process and leads to inconsistent project completion.
- Project-Based: You define a rate for each package and create a clearly defined rate card for your SEO services. A rate card is like a fancy expense sheet shared with the client listing each service in kind. Your project-based pricing is based on the estimated hours for each project. The hours are multiplied by your hourly rate to create your project-based price.
- Monthly: You set a monthly retainer for your services; a client pays this fixed amount each month. Your monthly retainer can be tied to the estimated number of hours you anticipate investing in the client's SEO services each month.
- Value-Based: You price your services based on the customer’s perceived value of the service or willingness to pay. This typically leads to higher prices for customers in those industries that stand to make a high return on your services.
- Keyword-Based: Your packages are priced based on the number of keywords a customer would like to optimize for. While many agencies sell SEO services this way, we don’t recommend it as the customer doesn’t often know how many keywords they will optimize for. Also, SEO is holistic and requires you to invest across a website, not just on a few specific web pages.
- Performance-Based: Your pricing depends on results, whether traffic increases, leads generated, or actual sales. While we love this pricing model as it ties your effort to the results, it does subject you to external factors. A prime example is changes in market conditions in whatever industry you are working in. It’s a higher-risk pricing model requiring significant due diligence during sales.
Our Recommended Pricing Model
If you are new to offering SEO services, we recommend starting with project-based and monthly pricing.
These are simple models that rely on estimating the number of hours you’ll invest into each service in your offering and multiplying this by your hourly rate.
This is a great place to start with your pricing as it protects your most valuable asset — your time. You can create your initial pricing based on your estimated hourly effort. Then, you can use time tracking to measure your estimates against reality and update your pricing over time making sure your SEO services are profitable.
As a friendly reminder, our packaging framework includes the projects noted below. If you’d like to learn more about this framework before diving into pricing, here’s our guide to packaging SEO services.
SEO Assessment
This is your on-ramp
SEO Set-Up
This is your accelerator
Monthly SEO
This is for maintenance & evolution
The recommended pricing model for each service is:
- SEO Assessment: Project-based.
- SEO Set-Up: Project-based.
- Monthly SEO: Monthly retainer.
Calculating Your Hourly Rate
If you don’t already know your hourly rate, invest time in calculating it as the profitability of your services depends on this number. Learn how to calculate your hourly rate from Jennifer Bourn. Jennifer is an amazing business coach for freelancers and has a fantastic breakdown of each step to take.
Next, let’s take a closer look at example pricing for each of the SEO services in the Pathfinder SEO lineup of offerings.
Pricing the SEO Assessment
We recommend starting the pricing exercise with the SEO Assessment. This is because it’s your smallest project and the easiest to estimate. Remember, we use a project-based pricing model for this service.
The Assessment has three phases and our agency’s hourly investment for this project is below:
- Onboarding — 1 hour
- Assessment — 3 hours
- Delivery — 1 hour
The total number of hours we invest in this project is 5 so we simply multiply this by our hourly rate of $150/hour to come up with our rate for the SEO Assessment which is $750.
The number of hours your agency will invest in this project may be different than what has been outlined above. You might also account for different hourly estimates for the different industries you serve.
The example above of 5 hours is appropriate for websites that serve local audiences such as restaurants, chiropractors, or attorneys. These are relatively small websites with uncomplicated keyword spaces.
When it comes to larger websites that serve national audiences such as an eCommerce site or a large blog, we may find the need to spend more time on the Assessment. Making the hourly estimate look more like this:
- Onboarding — 1 hour
- Assessment — 6 hours
- Delivery — 1 hour
Estimating this project for the client at 8 hours. Multiply this by the same hourly rate of $150/hour, and we price the project at $1,200.
Now, we have two defined rates for the two segments of our clientele. An SEO Assessment for a local business client is $750. An SEO Assessment for a business that serves a national audience is $1,200.
This is the beginning of your rate card for SEO services. Not bad, right? You’re off to a great start. Let’s continue to the next example of pricing for the SEO Set-Up.
Pricing the SEO Set-Up
We price the SEO Set-Up in the same way we did the SEO Assessment using a project-based model. We look at each step in the project and define our estimated hourly effort. Then, we multiply this by our hourly rate.
The primary difference is the time involved as there are more steps in an SEO Set-Up than in the SEO Assessment.
If you’ve already defined each step in your SEO Set-Up, then you can begin to estimate hours for each service offering. If you haven’t done so yet, define what you will include in your SEO Set-Up, first, and then you can begin pricing.
As a Pathfinder SEO subscriber, we accelerate you through this step by giving you access to the SEO Checklist. With that in hand, all you need to do is align your SEO Set-Up to follow it and you are off to the races.
Here’s a snapshot of what the first 5 steps look like.
Just as you did in the pricing of the SEO Assessment, you may also establish different hourly estimates for the SEO Set-Up depending on the audience you are targeting.
At our agency, the SEO Set-Up requires 15 hours of effort for local business clients and 25 hours of effort for websites that serve a national audience. Thus we charge 15 hours x $150 hour or $2,250 for local businesses and 25 hours x $150 = $3,750 for websites that serve a national audience.
As you estimate the hours you’ll invest into an SEO Set-Up, you may find yourself debating exactly how many hours is necessary for each step. Is keyword research a 2-hour task or a 4-hour task? Will I spend 2 or 6 hours creating a content strategy? It’s important to be realistic with these determinations.
But what about impressing the client with your efficiency?
First, recognize that you will win some and lose some. The correct focus, instead, should be on whether or not your hourly estimates level out over time. If you are estimating approximately 15 hours in a project that was sold as such, but truly requires 20 hours to complete, you’ve done yourself a disservice by not charging the remaining 5 hours of your time and efforts.
Second, remember that you are the captain of the ship. How deep you go into a website can depend on the project sold. You may decide that the project budget only allows you to do on-site optimization for the top-level pages on a website. And that investing in deeper-level pages on the client’s website needs to be part of the pricing for your monthly SEO tasks, which we will discuss in more detail in the next section.
Pricing Monthly SEO Services
Lastly, let’s break down pricing for your monthly SEO services. As a friendly reminder, we recommend breaking your monthly services into three tiers:
- Good: This is for prospects who want to maintain their results. They want to stay up to date with SEO and they take comfort in knowing that an SEO expert is reviewing the results and sharing insights each month.
- Better: This is for prospects looking to grow traffic in the months and years to come steadily. This prospect values collaboration on content marketing as one of the core means of driving growth.
- Best: This is for prospects who want next year’s results today. This prospect values collaboration on content marketing, often at a faster pace than the Better plan. Sometimes, this prospect has a significant hurdle to overcome like a big drop in traffic after the launch of a new website.
We price our monthly services by establishing hourly estimates for each package. Here’s an example for local business customers:
For those customers who serve a national audience, we increase the hourly estimate:
And it’s simple to then multiply by our hourly rate to clearly define the pricing for each.
Don’t Forget About Time Tracking
As you deliver your first projects, it’s essential that you track your time for each step. This way, you’ll have data to evaluate 3 months down the road for measurement. You can cross-reference how much time you invest in each task and project. And you can compare this against what is being sold.
Sometimes we invest more than budgeted in keyword research but then technical SEO goes quickly, for example. The nice part is that most of the time things balance out. If they don’t or you find that one aspect of your offering is always going over on time, you can simply go back to your rate card and adjust your prices for new prospects.
What's Next?
Estimate the hours for each of your SEO services offerings and calculate your prices. This creates a clearly defined rate card for your services to be shared with your prospective client.
Then, you are ready to market and sell your SEO services.
We’re Here to Help
We built Pathfinder SEO for agencies like yours who are looking to start and scale their SEO services offering. We’ll accelerate you through the process and help you avoid costly mistakes.
A subscription to the Pathfinder SEO platform includes access to all the resources you need to create your SEO services offering and effectively deliver the service. That includes templates, process documentation, and built-in SEO tools.
New Pathfinder SEO subscribers receive two free onboarding sessions with our SEO coaches.
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