I pride myself on being able to easily get across to my small-business clients how important it is to have a budget for internet marketing. What I don't pride myself on is the transition from close to sale at the end of my presentation. It seems as though I loose my clients attention at that point.
Nevertheless, there is a compensation standard for consultants and SEO's working in an effort to get the maximum amount of search engine exposure for their clients. Part of the compensation is for work done in advance of setting up the marketing campaigns and the other part is based on the periodic success of those internet marketing campaigns.
I will attempt to outline the basis of what I feel is a fair outline of compensation for SEO's consulting for their clients. Price points, fees, or per hour rates that SEO's set will vary from marketing agency to agency. The variation will be because of the contrast in experiences that the SEO will have had prior.
As I mentioned before there are 2 main scopes of compensation. They are as follows:
Per Hour Consulting Fee or Flat Setup Fee
During this stage the SEO may be working on the following tasks:
- Client discovery analysis - Understanding the Cleints Products / Services - Client Benefits over Competition
- Completing the online market research - Competition Keyword Analysis, Keyword Inventory Analysis
- Building the Keyword Universe / Sandbox - Gathering all of the current performing relevant keywords
- Search Engine Analysis - Determining the right search engine marketing product
- ROI forecast or Analysis - Understanding the cleints costs and price points
- keyword web page optimization- adding relevant keywords to various parts of the html and content areas of the site.
- Landing Page Development - Each targeted keyword need to have corresponding keyword focused landing pages.
- Writing Ad Text - Edit the company info, keywords, and call to action of the text ads
- Opening a keyword or search engine management account
- Executing the ads
Commission on Click's (Performance Based)
- Based on the total amount spent for traffic from search engines during the time period of the marketing campaign ( for PPC ad campaigns)
- SEO will regularly maintain keyword bid management accounts; adjusting bid amounts, daily budget, ROI analysis, ad text editing.
Example:
- Client was billed $1,500 by Google for traffic from the Google Adwords network. (Ad Spend)
- SEO then bills the client 20% of the the total ad spend in Google
$1,500 x .20 = $300 = Commission on Clicks
The setup fee stage is primarily based on the amount of time and effort it take for the SEO to create the marketing campaigns. An honest SEO will disclose his per hour rate. The more time that an SEO spends during this phase will benefit the overall success of the marketing campaign.
The commissions stage is based on the success of the performance of the ads. A good SEO will spend time daily managing the keyword ad campaign or PPC accounts, expanding the keyword sandbox, and creating corresponding landing pages. The more relevant traffic that reaches the clients site accompanied with higher conversion rates will be justification for the commissions paid to the SEO for the amount of traffic that he was able to drive to the clients site.
The views expressed in this post are that of my own and are based on my experiences working with my prospects and clients. The purpose of this post is to "layout" a pre-determined basis for compensation.
I would like to hear from other SEO's so if you agree or disagree, please let me know. Please register your comments unless you want to keep them private, then email them to me.
