Help!!! Need help with potential client

Hi all,

I have a client who wants to pay $200 per month for SEO until Septrember. Then he will evaluate and decide if he wants to continue.

All he has told me was that he wants to target 3 keywords. I do not know what the site is about, I do not know what keywords he wants to rank for. I asked for some additional info bute he just responded that he wants to know my pricing structure and he wants a contract for what I would be doing. I have never broken it out like this or done a contract.

Can anyone give me an idea of how you itemize your services/prices and what you put in a simple contract? I am new to this and customers so far have not asked for this type of breakdown/contract.

Thanks in advance for your help.

I think you should list your service into 2 part. It's SEO on-page and SEO off page. For On-page make list of site structure, etc. And for SEO off-page make a list of backlink service. The price i think 30% for on-page and 70% for Off-page. why off page is higher? Because you need to build variety backlink there. I hope this can help.

I wouldn't accept that without finding out what they keywords are and his current rankings. That will determine how hard it will be to rank his site, aka how much work you are going to have to do. From there on out it will be way easier to think of a price.

I've ran across clients like this in the past and they can be really bad news. While the money can be tempting it's really important to make sure that you avoid "poisonous" clients. These are clients that have the possibility of causing you more headaches than they are worth and can be identified in a number of ways, one of which is demanding a price before they'll even give you a keyword phrase. I'd be willing to bet he's got a whopper of a keyword phrase that should cost way more than $200.

There's a great contract on SEOMoz (Can I say that word here without rotten fruit being flung at me?) that you can tweak a bit to keep all of your interests protected, but definitely make sure you read over it because there are a few things that I like to rip out of it.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-contract-template-a-verbal-contract-isnt-worth-the-paper-its-written-on

As someone that's been doing this for a long time, I would really advise that you be prepared to walk away from this client, just from the little bit of information you have given us. Sometimes the money is just not worth the possible lawsuits, time, hassle, 3am phone calls, and arguments with the customer, especially for a $200 a month client.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your responses I have decided to ask again for more information before going ahead any further with this client. Will let you all know how it goes.