Another "what should I charge" thread

[dickbaker]

A friend of mine is redesigning a site for a company for the second time. The owner of the company is upset that the site isn't bringing in many visitors, and thus not much in the way of new sales leads.

He's currently paying a well-known company $2000 a month to optimize his site, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the SEO outfit is doing for them. No meta tags, no robots.txt files, no keyword optimization...nothing.

Anyway, my friend asked if I wanted to accompany him to the meeting next week and propose what I would do to increase traffic and SE ranking.

I'm looking at getting him inbound links, doing slight rewrites of his pages every month, adding press releases, etc.

Even though I've been very successful in SEO'ing sites I've created, I've never done any SEO work as a standalone job.

Any ideas on where to start with a fee?

[JohnieWalker]

Get a regular wage and work 9-5 / or: take a lower wage but earn % commisions on profit.

In short: The more the better :)

[yowza]

How about $2000 a month to take over all SEO. That seems like a good payment to me. If he is paying a company $2000 with no results, he shouldn't have a problem paying you $2000; it can't get any worse, it sounds like.

[tristo]

Is $2000/month a standard sort of fee? I would be expecting some pretty dazzling results for that sort of money.

[ogletree]

That is pretty low for a good SEO pro. High end SEO starts out at least at $5K a month. When I heard you say "well known SEO" that made me think it was one of those scams.

robots.txt and meta tags are not things you look at when you judge someones SEO ability. I have sites that get 10K visitors a day and don't have either.

[dickbaker]

Ogletree, I know there's more to it than meta tags and robots.txt files.

Right now this company's site is only getting 1400 to 1500 visitors a month. For the desired keywords, the site ranks anywhere from #355 to #704 in the SERP's on Google. Some of these keywords are pretty generic, and it would take a lot of work to get the site ranking highly for them, but I think it can be done.

The site has a PR of 5, which surprised me, considering that there are only three inbound links.

I just don't think the current SEO is doing $2000 a month worth of work.