I will start out with some background information on my experience, which I think / hope you will find interesting, and will try to keep it brief. My former boss needed SEO work done for his website. He hired one company which charged something like $1,000 for an initial / setup fee. They then charged a monthly rate, which I don’t remember now, with the stipulation that if something like 3 keywords are not on the first page for 3 of the top ten search engines (the contract said ten, even though it’s only really Google, Yahoo, and Bing that matter, and in that order) that a portion of the money would be refunded. The guarantee was not achieved and 50% of the money, which was accumulated over a 4 month period was refunded.

My former boss then hired another company which charged a setup fee as well, which I believe was in the $800 to $1,000 something price range, with a monthly rate of $800 to be charged. This monthly amount was then dropped to $400 after about 2 months because certain keywords were not performing well, but the rate was soon to go back up to $800. My former boss did not like this, and so he told me to learn how to do this and that he would pay me. That’s when I started with your book, which I chose because of all the excellent reviews it received on Amazon and for which my former boss paid for.

I was told to read the book during my work time when it wasn’t busy, and later on when it got too busy, paid something like $40 per week to read the book for about 3 hours on the weekend. I then told my boss that I was ready to begin after researching the keywords and ready to begin reading the Month 1 phase of the book. My former boss is paying me $150 per month and obsesses over one very important keyword being on Yahoo’s #1 spot, which has been there, but has dropped to #4 and is now back to # 3.

Now, before I got started, there were about 2 keywords on the first page of Google and Yahoo. I have chosen 11 keywords to work on of which 5 are on the 1st page of Google, 4 are on the 1st page of Yahoo, and 4 are on Bing. Three more are on the 2nd page of Google, 2 more on the 2nd page of Yahoo, and 2 more are on the 2nd page of Bing. Furthermore, other variations of the keywords I have chosen and even words I have not chosen, but are relevant, appear in the 1st and 2nd pages of the search engines.

I feel that $150 is too little, especially in comparison to what the others were charging and even doing way less work (I know because very little things were done on the site and no links were posted anywhere), and in comparison to what others do charge, and as a result, I have been moving at a slow pace to justify the cost. I also feel that with what I know thus far (I haven’t finished the book, but I have finished the Month 1 phase and have been reading several articles on this topic for a while now), that I could do this for others.

However, how much should I charge, and what exactly should I be selling: increasing visitors, an inclusion in the natural listings and when there, payment based on ranking positions, increased sales, what?

Looking forward to your response and to your future post, in which you stated that you’ll “focus on tips for proving your SEO skills”.

@RX, we don’t do work on commission for exactly the reasons you’re describing. In my opinion it would be prohibitively difficult, maybe even impossible to set up reliable tracking to attribute conversions to my efforts as an SEO. Even if your prospect would give you full access to their sales data, and even if the data were perfectly accurate (this is not a given!), it would be unfair to you as a consultant. For example, what if your SEO work helped to prevent your client from making a big design mistake that would compromise their indexing or conversion goals – how could you quantify the benefits in terms of sales? Also, if your client has an unnecessarily cumbersome “no inventory” system, it seems to me that it would be very difficult to assess how that problem might hold back some of the sales that your good SEO efforts might bring about. So, in my opinion, commission-based SEO payment plans are not really fair.

I was wondering what are your thoughts on this. Here are various examples: 1) pay based on the ranking of a set number of keywords on a set number of search engines and 2) pay based on a commission bases for the number of sales (i.e. 5%, 10%, etc. of sales), 3) something upfront, a small flat fee per month with the rest based on commission.

Regarding the being paid on a commission basis for total sales, the part that worries me is trusting the client to actually reveal how much sales they made (this is in regard to offline sales, as the ones online for most can be tracked: I say most because I have a client who receives orders online and then calls them to verify and to charge them since he needs to check what exactly he has in stock since he refuses to have an inventory system.). Orders made by telephone and in person would be difficult to track.

Can you please offer some advice concerning this?