The 8 Most Popular SEO Pricing Models in Market
1. Hourly Consulting
All SEO firms want the simplest way to price a project is to charge by the hour.
Rates in SEO vary with the lowest, entry level around $40-50, mid-level consultants around $100-$200 and high-demand firms $300-500. The extreme case charges $1,000 / hr.
Average Cost for this model: $2,500 sunk before anything happen, over $10,000 if your site rank on the 1st page.
2. Project-Based Consulting
Most SEO firms use the business model common to web development agencies and charge a flat fee (often in several chunks over the course of a project). The total price is based on an estimate of time, effort and personel involved in the project. They often charge in this fashion for a site review + keyword research + consulting time or for an on-site SEO training series.
Average Cost for this model: $5,000 non-refundable downpayment, over $15,000 if your site rank on the 1st page.
3. Contract Comprehensive Services
Plenty of SEO firms offer dozens of individual services, such as Directory submission service, Link building & publicity campaigns or Total SEO assessment services. Client will be charged for every single listed services.
Average Cost for this model: Start with $500 for the 1st service item, usually over $10,000 if your site rank on the 1st page.
4. Profit Sharing
A few number of SEO firms offer profit sharing based compensation. These frequently include a relatively small down payment ($2,500-5,000) to begin work and then a percentage of revenues (usually before non-essential expenses) from sales through the website. This can be a good option for SEO firms who have great confidence in their abilities and are ready to assume a significant share of risk. One big problem is that you’ll need to ensure that the business in good operations, outside of the website, are running on all cylinders, which really doesn’t fit well with the job of SEO. At last, when client’s ranks high in 1st. page, they will regret they didn’t choose to pay fixed fee for SEO. Cuz usually the high ranking brings high revenue which is much more than just SEO fee charges.
Average Cost for this model: it depends. Usually will not less than $1,000/month. Over $18,000 if your site rank on the 1st page.
5. Monthly Retainer
A few good SEO firms use a basic monthly retainer with a standard workload package (or several options). My friends up in Quebec modify this system so that during development, marketing & ongoing maintenance, different prices are charged as part of the retainer. This can be a very good model for companies seeking to retain clients over a long period of time, but it can also be abused by those who claim (hopefully falsely) that the site will “lose its rankings” if the customer cancels.
Average Cost for this model: $150 per keyword, $1,500/month for multi-keywords.
6. Pay for Rankings
This is one of the more interesting strategies that SEO firms employ. The idea being that you pay one price for reaching, say, page 2 of a particular result, another price for position 10, 9, 8 and so on, usually with particular bonuses for #1-3 rankings. It really only makes sense for companies seeking to rank for a particular set of terms/phrases that they know converts quite highly.
Average Cost for this model: $1,500 for #7-10, additional locked bonus for #1-6. Final cost could be $2,500 per keyword if ranked #1-3.
7. Pay for Traffic
As with pay-per-ranking, a traffic payment system treats SEO very much like PPC. I like this model in some respects, because it does measure the SEO’s work, but it can get messy as the quality of traffic isn’t measured here (of course, this usually only counts search engine traffic, but still…).
With those covered, let’s dive into the prices themselves. If you’re in the market for SEO services, there’s a lot of factors that can affect what you should expect to pay, not to mention the great number of formats an SEO contract might take.
Not common in these days, cost uncontrollable.
8. Pay for Guaranteed Result
So far as I know, there’re dozens of SEO firms offer Result Guaranteed Service, only very few of are practicing the real ‘Pay for Guaranteed Result’ from clients expectation. Usually the trick are more or less like the following:
- Guaranteed Yes! How do you like to pay for guaranteed on 2nd page, 3rd page even 5th page?
- Guaranteed Yes! Would you accept Guaranteed with no time frame?
- Guaranteed with $1,500 or more non-refundabale whatever initiation fee?
- Non refundable $1,000 or more whatever Sunk Cost, on link submission, registration or list fee? …
New in market, fees varies from case to case.