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My idea is you would charge a cost for the initial work and then the client pays you each hour you work after that set fee.
Does anyone use this system? What are the going rates for SEO work?
What are the going rates for SEO work?
Unfortunately there is no going rate for SEO work. There are many variables involved when pricing SEO/SEM. Some of those variables are level of knowledge and experience, location, breadth of services, etc.
Charging by the hour does not work well. Some services require more expertise while others can be handled by non SEO personnel.
I typically charge an initial setup fee and then 90 day retainer fees billable in advance.
I am working towards setting up a pay for performance rate, with a minimum click charge. This is still largely conceptual, but I cannot see just blindly charging customers "my going rate". Customers want to know what they are going to get for a fee. Rare indeed will be the SEO client who will contract with someone who promises "to work really hard".
I've seen some 1st place Overture search returns fetch $20 for a single click. I've heard they can go much higher. The higher the PPC rate, the more competition there will be for that keyword, the greater benefit per visitor. However, at Overture, a client can simply turn off their listing at any time and cease accruing charges, whereas with raw SERPS, there is no off switch, they're there 24/7/365.
Ideally, to do this, one would have an Overture account, and you would have all these keywords listed, then you could get the prices for a keyword for different positions, and then charge a fraction of that rate for real SERPS. So, if Overture charges $0.40 per click for a #4 position for "edible cajun widgets" you might charge just 25% of that or $0.10 per click, and set a minimum per click charge of $0.04 or something. This would probably work provided you had access to the clients server logs, which would, of course, have to be deliniated in your contract.
Another issue with this is that I can't always tell what position the listing was that was clicked on because usually I'll have multiple listings per search. For instance, if someone searches for "smelly widgets", I might have a page at #1 (my smelly-widgets.html page), but I also might be ranked #4 (for my foul-smelly-widgets.html page), and #6 (for my jasmine-scented-smelly-widgets.html page), and #9 (for my anti-smelly-widgets.html page).
Because of the residual nature of SEO results, you work like crazy for a couple of months with absolutely no return, and then gradually the site climbs the ranks and stays there for usually extended periods of time, garnering residual income from those returns just seems the fairest way to do the work to me, for both client and SEO'er.
Residual income could cause another problem though. Say you work for two or three months on someone's site and they decide not to pay you any more, and they benefit from your work from an extended period of time thereafter. There are only a couple of resources I can think of that would fix this and one would be careful copyright provisioning in the SEO contract/TOS. As long as the SEO'er retained all copyright rights to created SEO'd content, then if a client site decided he didn't want to pay your services any longer he would be liable for some extreme civil penalties, unless he took those content pages offline immediately, especially so if the copyrighted pages were formally registered. Another idea on this is for the SEO'd pages to be called dynamically, where the SEO'd content was on another server not controlled by the client, just called by a script running on the client's server.
I suppose this is off-topic now and has turned into "how to insure you get paid" rather than "what is the going rate for SEO work", but then the going rate may well depend on how secure you are with gettin paid what was agreed upon.
By the way I am back to posting again.
I've been doing this for the last couple of years. It works very well ;)
