15 replies to this topic

[kylesutcliffe]

Hi, I have spent basically the whole week reading about SEO (except today) and learning everything about SEO - I plan on doing this for this for a couple of weeks. One thing that I can't find information is is how to price and package seo. Currently I resell seo packages from a company in Australia but I plan to add my own SEO services in Feburary / March / April once I fully understand SEO principals and techniques.

Any responses would be most appreciated.

Kyle.

Edited by kylesutcliffe, 03 January 2007 - 03:36 AM.

[A.N.Onym]

First of all, I have to say that you need to learn more SEO, if that's just a week of studying you have got to offer to your clients. Certainly, delivering SE-friendly website design will be a plus over other web design companies, but offering such services? Are you sure you will be able to deliver results in a couple of months?

Secondly, why doesn't that company send you web design business? If someone does SEO for a living, they may send you clients that need design or redesign (with SEO in mind, of course).

If you meant the packages you offer on your site, one of them is, if not a fraud, a misinformation, because with even one link to a website, you get indexed. For free. No need in SE submissions.

The other one talks about software site optimization, but if you optimize for the people, how can software know what to write? Will it produce human-friendly, readable text? Or will it just tell you how to appease to the search engines instead of the people? Then this one is pretty rubbish as well.

Sure, you can use customer (keyword) research tools, but you need to write content/optimize pages yourself, because you are doing it for the people.

I am sure you've seen the Quick Kick-Start Guide to SEO on this forum. If you want to understand SEO, you'll need not only keyword research skills, but also the experience of using them on your site, the art of link building and content writing and such.

If you think your clients will need SEO and you can not swear by your eternal happiness that you will deliver results, you may be better off referring the clients to more experienced SEOs. In a way, building a network of people you work and communicate with may help getting more clients.

If you want to improve your web design skills and be ahead of your competition, I'd advise studying website usability and accessibility. This will make sure your designs are not only beautiful, but that they also will work for those, who will be using them.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 03 January 2007 - 04:31 AM.

[kylesutcliffe]

Mate, I don't think you understand how I would be going about this.

Firstly I have found classes on SEO which I have booked into, secondly the product is not a fraud you can read about it here and also here.

I also stated that a week was not going to be all my research into SEO, and that I wasn't going to provide these services until I fully understand the principals and techniques behind SEO, thats if I decided to provide these services.

[A.N.Onym]

Well, a week or several months don't change a bit, I am afraid. Unless you study for 5 hours a day, then you may have a deeper understanding of the industry. I am not sure what you have studied in the university/college, though.

Well, it is good that you won't be offering the services, if you are not sure in the results.

Sorry, I stand by my comments about those SEO tools. An on-page factors (keywords in tags) report may be useful, but I shouldn't pay that much for the software. Just looking at a page from the browser and looking for the page-related keywords will reveal to anyone how well the page is optimized. For free.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 03 January 2007 - 04:35 AM.

[kylesutcliffe]

It wasn't a university course, it is a course that I found on the internet that I got off this site. You say that a week or several months doesn't change anything? How are you meant to learn about SEO and start to offer this service then?

Thanks for your opinions, I do appreciate them.

[A.N.Onym]

Well, you need time to learn all the aspects of SEO, which will take several months (I mean, just to be able to name the most, not to understand everything). Then you need months or years of practice of optimizing and promoting websites.

As I said, you'd be better off just making your websites usable, SE friendly, than providing additional SEO services. Or restrict yourself to basic SEO services, such as keyword research and on-page optimization.

[kylesutcliffe]

Ok, thanks for your help. Hope there isn't any bad feelings between us from our disagrement with post 2.

Thanks.

[fisicx]

Good advice from Yuri there.

Here's a thought for you Kyle: Good SEO is built into good web design.

One of the first pieces of information you see on any webpage is the title. It resides in the document head and is the information displayed by all search engines on the results page.

You can no doubt buy software that will generate titles for you, and you can use PHP to do much the same. But if you really want to impress clients, the search engines and potential customers you need to spent time crafting an sentence that encapsulates the essence of the individual page. And you need to do it in 60 characters or less.

You should then back this up with a meaningful description. This metatag again resides in the document head and should support the information given in the page title. If you take time over the description you can create a killer sales pitch that will draw potential customers into the site from the search engines. And you have about 150 characters to do this.

If you get the page title and description right then you will have managed more SEO than a high percentage of existing websites. One could argue that you can't do this until you have built the page but if you have gone through a structured design process you will know exactly what the purpose of the page is before you write a single line of code.

Which leads back to my opening statement - if you have a good design then the SEO is a natural consequence of that design.

I've been hanging around this forum for a while now and whilst I've learnt a huge amount some of the topics still leave me breathless. Good luck on your course, but I believe you would be far better off building SEO into your design skills. SEO is not a bolt on, it is part of effective design.

[rmccarley]

I've gotta say I second Yuri's caution but it seems you have the right attitude so good luck!

fisicx makes a good point about SEO being built into the design. This is often difficult as designers want things pretty and SEOs want things text but there is a place where the two meet. It does take time to find it though.

SEO is very different from regular web design though as it extends beyond the site you build into promotion on other websites that you don't own or control.

In addition to the links above I suggest looking at seomoz.org. Rand is a mod here and generaly smart person. I also suggest reading Anatomy of a Search Engine. Hopefully the author's names will strike you as familiar. While that document is most likely out of date it does give great insite into how SEs work.

There are a bunch of articles on my site as well which leads me to my next point: check the sig links of posters who make sense and offer good advice.

Finally, keep asking questions here. We're all here to learn and teach what we've learned and this site is a great resource.

[HighRank]

Kyle,

There is no general standard for pricing SEO. These "SEO packages" sold by various so called SEO's are pretty much worthless. The reality is that every SEO project should be priced differently based upon what your clients are trying to accomplish on the web and what you need to do to make it happen for them. For example, someone who wants their website to rank on the 1st page of Google for a highly competitive search phrase like "credit card processing" should be charged more than the business who only wants to rank for local searches like "san diego printing company". Why? The more competitive the phrases that your clients want to rank for, the more work you have to do as an SEO. If you actually want to provide value for your clients by actually helping them out you shouldn't even offer SEO services until you've proven that you can actually do it. Take a few sites of your own and learn to do optimization by getting those sites to rank for competitive search terms. While reading about SEO is a good start, it won't give you all the experience you need. Sorry to say but a couple weeks or even a couple of months of reading will not teach you all about SEO. Actual trial and error with the sites you optimize will help you learn what works and what doesn't work. The last thing you want to do is screw someone over by trying to do SEO work and messing up their site. Bad SEO can do a lot of damage to a website, sometimes irreversible. Most the time it's the beginners that make these types of mistakes. Your best bet is to learn how to do optimization with your test sites and after you prove you can do it then offer SEO services. It's really not worth it to offer optimization unless you can actually help people out.

[EGOL]

I think that if you have an ability to do great design and great SEO then you will be in full demand. Lots of SEOs don't do design and lots of designers don't do SEO - yet they need to be mindful of one another.

The most important thing that you can do is to start experimenting with some websites. Try many things, change them, keep carefull records, see what happens.

It is one thing to learn something... and another to have deep experience that allows you to understand how things work in concert.

[sanity]

Welcome to Cre8asite HighRank. That's some excellent advice.

[DougB]

Greeting's from another first time poster here at cre8asite.

Learning "everything you can" about SEO in a short period of time is going to leave you vulnerable, especially in todays litigatious society if you get overly expansive about your qualifications as an SEO "expert". However I think that the advise thats been given to you here today is great and should take you a long way towards achieving your goals, both immediate and future should you decide to add SEO skills to your design capabilities. Remember its easy to design a mind blowing site, its much harder to engineer sales for said site if it can't be found!

Good luck Kyle!

DougB

[sanity]

Welcome to Cre8asite DougB!

Some more good advice. I'd also like to add that as a potential client I'd be wary of someone who calls themselves an expert after a week or two of reading. As most of us know it takes years of learning and doing and it's always ongoing.

In an ideal world our prospective clients should do a bit of checking before hiring but sadly this is not always the case.

[boris]

Another newbie to the forums, I have been into SEO for about 2 years now and still do not know everything, even though I sell my services as an SEO.

The reality is that there are some good concrete things that everyone learns from SEO, then on a site by site basis you pick up the things that work specifically for your clients.

Some things are not guaranteed either (link baiting anyone?) and all of this compounded by the fact that we are all pretty much at the mercy of Google to come extent.

The way we price our services is slightly different to other SEO companies, we charge either consultancy based on our agency day rate for those that want to do the work themselves.

Alternatively, we provide a monthly service which is more expensive, but allows us as an agency to add content, build backlinks and add design elements to our clients website. We definitely sell this service as a site update service with SEO component, ensuring that the clients website is always fresh and up-to-date.

Because of that, our clients concentrate on what we bring to their site from a content POV and as the rankings build that see the advantages of the work we do. Definitely a better tack to take than promising them 10,000 leads a month in 6 months time!

[Ruud]

When you price a product or service there is cost, value and perceived value. If your cost is low you can price low -- but funnily enough that often negatively impacts the perceived value of your product or service.

If you put a high price tag it doesn't automatically follow that people perceive you as high value though. The higher price asks for reputation (think of the big industry names). The higher price also establishes other expectations: can you manage those expectations?

My idea, on a practical level, for people who have just begun to market their services is to estimate the number of hours they expect to devote to a project. Pick a reasonable price/hour which is comfortably above MacDonald's but a lot below an MD's, multiply -- and you have a service price.

As you finish more and more projects you start to get a better feel for how long certain tasks will take you -- and how complicated they can be. You'll learn to factor this into your pricing.