Offline Marketing SEO Fees

There is an interesting thread over at WF discussing SEO fees:


I provide SEO services to small businesses, and the fees I charge all depend on the business. I certainly charge the doctors/lawyers a lot more to design their sites/manage the SEO/email marketing than I do for the same services of someone who is working out of their home.

Small businesses are becoming increasingly aware of things like SEO and Google Analytics, even CMS's like Joomla and WordPress. I was at a local networking meeting with small businesses and these topics all came up in conversation. Of course, none of the small businesses had any clue as to what to do with the Google analytics info, but at least they knew about it.

How do your fees compare to some of the fees discussed on WF?

The fees you charge does depend on the business you are going after and how competitive the market is. Would you charge a dentist in a city with a population of 100,000 people the same as a dentist in a city with a population of 500,000?

Small businesses probably know 1/10th of what we know about SEO (atleast people here on BHW) and along with that, you should also focus on providing them with an overall marketing package and not just SEO. Getting a site to the top is one thing, but having a call to action is just as important. Hope this helps.

The fees definitely depend on the business. For example, I have a dentist as a client who spends $15,000/year advertising in the yellow pages. I charged him $2,000 to set up an 8 page website, and now charge him $300/month for SEO. The most visited page on their site is the directions to the office (beside the home page) - where I have an interactive Google Maps page giving people driving directions.

On the other hand, I have a small company working out of their home where I charged them $600 to set up a 6 page website (don't tell the dentist that lol). I have also set them up on Twitter, which they are still trying to understand. When I show them how Google is now providing scrolling updates from tweets and blogs for keyword search terms I think they will be twittering more.

I spoke with a guy at the networking meeting who runs 5 different businesses, but his main business is in a niche targeting 5-10 year olds. There is not a lot of people searching on the web for it - so I think that offline advertising is more appropriate. He told me he was spending over $1,000/month in newspaper advertising, and getting maybe 1 or 2 people in a weekend into his shop who had seen the ad.

Talking with business owners and listening to what they are paying the space reps for the yellow page and newspapers - and that they are not getting any results from spending over $1,000 month in advertising makes monthly seo fees an easy sell.