What are the primary SEO pricing plans?

To be a salesperson in a digital market can be quite a challenge as the clients order the services that won’t obviously bring visible results. They do not purchase something that they can evaluate at once. Selling optimization services is a very consultative venture that requires special abilities. A person who sells SEO should be well motivated by a commission check. 

Selling optimization services require a well understanding of digital space, ranking algorithms work, SEO company pricing plans and optimization services specific. Moreover, you should keep up with the last industry changes and novelties. A good SEO specialist should balance the need to bring revenue into the company while ensuring that this business won’t lead to future issues. Agreeing with a client, an SEO consultant need to ensure that there are enough resources on the client’s side, all client’s expectations are set appropriately, and he understands the basics of an optimization process.

To stay on the TOP of a competitive digital market sphere, optimization agencies need to make sure that they operate profitably. To survive as a well-run optimization business, you need to put in place measurements of effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability. Moreover, you need to be sure that you provide a fair rate that goes within all industry standards. A reasonable price will help you to reach profitability goals and improve your company's brand image. 

You need to have a particular SEO pricing plan to evaluate your search engine optimization initiatives. First of all, you need to determine your profit goals. How much do you want to raise from each deal? This rate can vary from 10% to 30% depending on your business goals and priorities. Moreover, you should calculate the fixed overhead costs (must have costs that you are charged no matter what your sales are), variable costs (these values depend on the number of sales and what the relationship is to the sale dollar), and direct costs (direct labor, services, etc.) for the actual job. Putting together all these aspects, you will get a sum of your targeted profit.

Generally speaking, pricing SEO is one of the most significant challenges as the most prospects have an only general understanding of SEO and the process and time involved in the efforts. The best you can do is get a sense of how much time may be required to spend adequate time to meet the specific optimization goals. 

In our days the demand for optimization services far exceed the supplies. That is why SEO pricing plans vary from agency to agency, and from region to region.

In this article, I am going to discuss how search engine optimization is priced and how to consider the fair pricing models for SEO. 

The structure for SEO pricing

In our days there are a lot of optimization companies that still offer package rates for SEO. However, in reality, SEO is not something that can be packaged. Unless you are hiring an agency to provide you with tactical deliverables such as keyword research, competitive analysis, SEO audit, usability consulting, etc. 

If we talk about SEO as a continuously evolving process, there shouldn’t be any packages. It is something unique for each web source that has its competitive environment, and assets such as blogs, news, product search, and others. Moreover, client goals also differ from one business to another. 

That is why to set a definite price for SEO plan; you should make clear the following aspects:

• Who is going to write content?
• Who is responsible for social media marketing and PR?
• Do a client needs design improvement services?
• Who is doing link building?
• Who is restructuring the website?
• What CRM system a client has used before?

Modern SEO combines a lot of marketing and web development services so that they work well together. All of the mentioned above aspects go to scope and subsequently each requires time and efforts. A client should pay for company’s time and resource spendings. 

SEO pricing structure could be conditionally divided into cost of talent and cost of software. Let us have a closer look at these SEO pricing model components.

Cost of talent

You have probably seen the ads where a company provides monthly optimization services for less than $500, while other businesses propose a monthly rate of $20,000 per month. What do you think about it? What factors make this difference? 

If you are going to work with at least middle-sized optimization company where the number of employees does not exceed 30 people, you will face with the fact that each of these specialists is paid at least $500 per month. In other words, an optimization company won’t cut its losses providing a cheap rate for monthly optimization services. So, the low price for SEO can denote two things. The first one is that all optimization services will be provided by one SEO consultant, not a team of professionals. The second one is that for this money you will obtain a standard approach for your website optimization.

However, everything depends on your expectations. If you think that the $500 a month SEO provides the same value as the $20,000 monthly SEO pricing plan, you are probably going to be wrong. It can’t be the same. Chances are the $20,000 a month SEO company are hiring people that cost more than $500 a month. And while these deliverables seem the same, in the long run, you are paying for the level of professionality and experience your SEO consultants have. 

Cost of software

Currently, each winning optimization campaign should be followed by quality optimization software. There are both free and paid optimization tools available on the web. Tools that cost more than $200 per month provide a great variety of research and management services helping SEO consultants do their work well. That is why the firms charging $20,000 per month may use quality optimization software for managing their efforts that costs, for example, $10,000 per month.