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The other variable seems to be in which region of the World one is operating. e.g. Asia , Europe , US
What budget would be sufficient for a large site?
I'm seeing one regarded operator receiving consistantly 4-5M uniques a month operating with a full time manager and 2 juniors over 4000 sites. The rate for the manager is around US$80k per annum - although the systems are established.
What's the current charge out rates and time required for the various steps in analysing, recommending and ongoing support for clients? I think Brett spoke of US$1000 per day and 1 - 3 days of analysis and recommendation.
And for SEO selection for larger sites, what's the evaluation criteria and roles a business should be ticking off on to make a good choice of consultant or inhouse SEO personnel team?
Depends on needs analysis - eg, we don't do pricing until we know what we're looking at...however, we do have an hourly rate we must hit for the business to make sense.
>What budget would be sufficient for a large site?
Whatever meets your criteria for a good sale. ;) Eg, if the work will take a hundred hours monthly, and your bill rate is $100 / hour, then the contract has to pay minimum of $10,000 monthly.
>>>And for SEO selection for larger sites, what's the evaluation criteria and roles a business should be ticking off on to make a good choice of consultant or inhouse SEO personnel team?
Personally, I'm incredibly picky. I've helped hire, train, and manage both in house SEO personnel as well as staff for my own firm.
1) They must be technical
2) They must know HTML & RSS.
3) Familiarity with different search engines, algorithms, link analysis, page analysis, etc.
4) Industry knowledge - do they think altavista has it's own spider, or do they know that Inkomi doesn't "exist" anymore?
5) Usability, conversion rates, and getting people to come back to the site.
I've reviewed proposals that made reference to the algorithms of defunct search engines, and I've spoken to SEO professionals that claimed the title tag was the most important piece of the Google algo.
While I don't expect people to be better than I am at everything, for the role they fill in the overall team, they must excel my own knowledge of that particular space / role that they'll be filing.
Hope that helps, and good luck - the tired cliche is true, good people are hard to find. Though, as long as you're clear in what you want, it's possible to hire folks that will exceed even your own high expectations of performance.
