SEO for a local site using 301 a redirect

A guy wants me to do SEO for his local plumbing business. He owns the website so just in case I do rank him and he doesn't pay, I want to be able to remove the 301 and he loses his rankings. I have a few questions though:

Does is matter if its a com, net, org, or info?

Does the anchor text to the 301 domain get pushed along with the link juice to the main domain? I want to rank for "city plumbing" "city plumbers" etc, would I just backlink to the 301 using those anchors just like I would if I was linking directly to the main domain? Im pretty sure I can rank this very easily as theres almost no competition. Just google places results and none of them have a website.

A little OT, but I dont know what to charge him either. Right now I have a dentist site ranking #2 (above google places even) and it has only gotten 10 visits this month (google KW tool shows 36 exact searches a month)
With this "city plumbing" keyword google shows 0. At first I though $100 a month would be good, but after seeing 0 searches I dunno. Thoughts?

You must live in a very small town or city if you got so few searches for "city plumbing".

dgfalk said:

A guy wants me to do SEO for his local plumbing business. He owns the website so just in case I do rank him and he doesn't pay, I want to be able to remove the 301 and he loses his rankings.

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Are you doing basic SEO or a Google Places listing + optimization or both?

dgfalk said:

A little OT, but I dont know what to charge him either..

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You could charge a setup fee and a monthly fee. The amount really does depend on the client's market and their customer value.

If there are no search results and the client gets no leads/sales from your SEO work, he may just dump you. In this case, a backup plan would be to offer local business PPC.

SEOWhizz said:

Are you doing basic SEO or a Google Places listing + optimization or both?

You could charge a setup fee and a monthly fee. The amount really does depend on the client's market and their customer value.

If there are no search results and the client gets no leads/sales from your SEO work, he may just dump you. In this case, a backup plan would be to offer local business PPC.

Click to expand...

I'd would definitively do basic SEO on his website, and also help him out with google places. So hopefully that works, but I have no interest in PPC. Im thinking what I will do is rank his site, see if he's happy after a month then send him a bill. The only thing is after you rank a google place it would be hard to make his rankings drop if he didn't pay. I sorta know the guy though, hes a friend of one of my best friends. I could probably just beat it out of him!

dgfalk said:

Does is matter if its a com, net, org, or info?

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No. You could use any TLD.

dgfalk said:

Does the anchor text to the 301 domain get pushed along with the link juice to the main domain? I want to rank for "city plumbing" "city plumbers" etc, would I just backlink to the 301 using those anchors just like I would if I was linking directly to the main domain?

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Yes.

TBH, the 301 redirect trick can be traced. If I hired a backlinker to do some work and they did a 301 redirect, I'd drop them pretty quick.

As for the 301, from my experience it doesn't make any difference what kind of TLD you are using. About the keywords in the URL dunno i always picked those which had it in them.

Payment when you are talking to a client I usually tell them that it will take x$ to get the site there, and then 1/3 of that price for maintenance. How much to charge??? that's the tough question, you could really ask how much a dentist is making from each lead. And work from there.