Relevant Pricing = Higher Profits for SEO Companies
Pricing structures have always been the source of much discussion among professional SEO's. Knowing how much to charge for SEO services is difficult, and it depends on so many factors. So in the beginning, most SEO's tend to charge less for their services, then spend hour upon hour getting results for their clients.
From there, those satisfied customers (hopefully) recommend the SEO to other potential customers, and slowly but surely, the SEO can raise the price of his or her work to a more equitable amount.
Besides the wide differences in charges, there is also a wide assortment of pricing plans, from flat charges to individual charges for individual services, and even to charges based on traffic or sales. SEO's are constantly testing out new pricing structures to try to arrive at one that suits both the clients and the SEO, one that is fair for both sides.
One professional SEO, Barry Lloyd, has experimented with pricing structures for several years, and he's arrived at a plan that works extremely well for him. With his rather unique plan, the advantages to the client are simple: no relevant traffic = no cost. The advantages to a good SEO are also simple: usually a higher income, less hassle, and a client who is no longer hung up on rankings but who is more interested in relevant traffic and ROI.
Barry is one of the top SEO's in the UK and is the CEO of Microchannel Technologies Ltd., which provides search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) services through their MakeMeTop brand – http://www.makemetop.co.uk. Barry is also a regular speaker at Internet marketing conferences and a senior contributor at many of the online forums.
When asked for background information about MakeMeTop and his pricing structures, here's what Barry had to say.
"When MakeMeTop first started providing professional SEO services as a company in 1999, we found it hard to create a model which was attractive to customers. Few had any real understanding of the benefits of search engine marketing, and we didn't really understand what our work was worth. So we undervalued ourselves, rather than charging what our work was really worth.
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