How To Charge Clients For Paid Links?

Hi All

Just a question about how you handle client link building.

Say if you're a freelance SEO and have a client on a $750 per month which covers onsite & offsite SEO.

If a mommy blogger (random example) website was to request $50 for the inclusion of an article and link, how would you go about charging the client for this?

Would you invoice them additional money spent on links, or would you just deduct the amount of time you spend on them that month?

Would you set aside x amount on a monthly average basis for any costs associated with link building (whether it was buying citations instead of manually doing them, buying links, or to pay for a guest post containing a link to be published)?

Interested to see what approach more experienced SEOs on this board would do in this situation.

Thanks in advance

An article can usually be placed at a margin of 50-100%. Linkbuilding should account for about 50% of the costs.
Always calculate how much your one hour of work costs and how many hours you spend for each customer.

$750 is a difficult budget, quality links aren't cheap and with just one budget for everything, delivering more quality offpage means less money in your pocket. So, with a clean and sustained approach, you'll end up with little profit. That's one of the reasons why some many agencies with mainly "small" customers are using approaches like PBNs or focus on doing onpage only. If you have $500 external cost on a $750 budget and calculate office, administration, customer acquisition, support, communication, maybe employees, you end up with little to no profit or terrible effective hourly rates. Keep in mind that many costs occur per customer and don't depend on the budget.

A guy spending $750 doesn't write less emails, isn't happy with a less detailed reporting, doesn't call less often than someone spending $5k. Even worse, those customers are more picky because they pay you out of their own pocket. Dealing with the marketing department of a big company is a lot easier. They just care for reaching all milestones/goals set and will make sure the yearly budget is fully spent, saving money means less budget next year and it's not their own money.

You need to explain your clients from now on that seo requires 'budget' + 'fee'. If you as freelancer didn't explain that, maybe they will not pay extra and you will have to deduct 50$.

For smaller clients when price is <800$ we usually set a side 100-200$ for offsite and use 600$ as fee.

For larger clients we negotiate budget and fee as there is more delicate work, higher competition etc.

Great thanks guys.

I'll do that going forward. I just wanted to get some other opinions and guidance this early on to see what the best approach is for me going forward.

That makes sense.

Going forward if a budget is $750 monthly - maybe suggest 750 + 250 for link building monthly.

Then if budget isn't used it can be carried over etc?

On the topic of buying links, do you guys typically buy PBN links for clients, or do the manual outreach and just pay the sites/bloggers that ask for a fee to post?

Thanks

@lolseo

1. This is fair strategy you mentioned (budget being carried over) - use that
2. You can't price SEO as product - every project is different and cost more or less. Maybe create some price scale for yourself and set price for project only after deep research.
3. PBN - we buy only for tier 2 websites on bigger projects, we are more white hat
4. As I don't know your niche or prices for bloggers/sites I can't tell you what is best. But 250$ is low amount for high quality guest posts.
5. I would suggest on projects with that kind of budget - focus on content + on page - structure etc - for link building you can be "smart" and pay for quality PBN to create some kw movement - after that explain client that competition is doing extra work and you would need extra budget for distribution (press releases, guest posts) to hit that higher positions.