SEO is one of many markets where getting some straight answers on how much a particular service is worth is hard to find. What is a reasonable fee SEOs should charge for getting your site to the top 10 results on Google for example? While most SEO companies prefer to charge monthly maintenance contract fees or large setup fees initially and a small monthly fee, in our opinion measurable results speak louder than well polished monthly status reports. Once you talk to a few reputable SEO companies and request a quote, you will see wildly different search engine optimization pricing and contract terms. Sometimes the total costs can vary by as much 50%-10,000%. How is an average website owner supposed to make sense of all the pricing options and SEO guarantees?

Well, let’s start with some fundamentals about how SEO company’s determine pricing for their SEO services

1. Most SEOs will spend some time analyzing your site and come with a keyword list of about 5 to 10 target phrases unless you already have a specific keyword list.
2. They will check your site’s age, ranking, Google PageRank and current link popularity.
3. They will take a look the competition and the search engine results landscape for the chosen keywords. They will get answers to things like how old the sites are in the top 10 results, how many back links they have, what’s the average Google PageRank of the top 10-20 sites and many other important metrics.
4. Next they will determine if the target keywords has low competition, moderate competition, or very high competition. They will use the keywords in quotes, enter the Google search commands for checking anchor text competition (allinanchor) and title tag competition (allintitle).

Based on where your site currently ranks in the search results can have a very important affect on the SEO pricing. Lifting a website to the first page results of Google from say number 500 is a lot tougher than moving it from the 50th position to the top 10.

As a webmaster paying for SEO services you only care about seeing your site in the top 10 and not so much about how your site gets there, but from a search engine optimization company’s perspective it’s very important to take into consideration all the above variables.

Still, there are some guidelines you should use in gauging whether or not your are over paying for SEO services. One very telling research method is running the Google Traffic Estimator Tool using your target keywords. We believe in letting the pay-per-click market determine how much you should pay for SEO services. Here is a quick example. Using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool take a look at the results for the keyword “golf shoes”. What you will notice is that this keyword can cost Google Adwords advertisers between $720 - $1,200 a day to be in the number 1 to 2 in the sponsored results. Let’s take the low end of the spectrum and multiply 30 days X $720 = $21,600 a month in advertising costs just for this one keyword. So how much a SEO should charge for getting a natural top 10 ranking on Google for this keyword? How about $259,200?

By doing some home work with the Google Traffic Estimator Tool and taking a look at the exact phrase competition for “golf shoes” on Google you would be a lot better equipped to sort out who can offer you the best SEO services and pricing.

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