Knowing how to charge for search engine optimisation services is the key to building a profitable agency. Keeping your clients happy and profitable should be the number 1 priority.
Let me tell you a story about 4 men who wanted to look smart for a job interview. They all had the same budget of £100.
The first man didn’t want to spend £100 on a smart suit so he went out and bought some material and spent a week learning about how to sew the material together to make a nice suit. He didn’t think being a tailor could be that hard and was sure he could make a better job himself.
Unfortunately making a suit was harder than he expected and the results were less than impressive. He ended up making a mess of it and the interviewer didn’t give him the job.
The second man spent a week scouring the town to find the cheapest tailor he could. Having got a number of quotes he mangaged to find somebody who would make him a suit for £50 which he thought was a great deal, especially when some tailors were charging £200.
Unfortunately the cheap tailor didn’t do a good job of the suit and it was very badly fitted and used cheap materials. The man had just £50 left and couldn’t afford a second suit so he went to the interview anyway and, needless to say, didn’t get the job.
The third man also spent a week looking round the town to find a good tailor. He didn’t want to go with the cheapest but he wasn’t prepared to pay the top price either. He went to the best tailor in town who quoted £200 for a really special suit. The man only had £100 and he spent hours discussing the quote until eventually the tailor agreed to make him a suit for £100.
Because the tailor was on a limited budget he wasn’t able to devote his usual resources and high quality materials to making the suit and it was nowhere near the usual standard. As a result the third man looked just as scruffy as the others and didn’t get the job.
The fourth man wanted to look really smart so he spent a couple of days scouring the town for the best possible tailor. When he found out the suit cost £200 he went to the bank and took out a loan for the money.
The man ended up getting top quality service and a smart suit. He also got the job.
SEO isn’t about getting the cheapest deal. It’s about getting to the top of the search engines.
When you look at a competitive industry do you think the sites ranking at the top are the ones who paid the least or the ones who are paying a skilled company at the price they quoted?
It might seem better to pay £200 a month for SEO services but if you don’t get good results then the £200 (and probably a lot of time) has been wasted. On the other hand if you paid £2000 a month and got to the top of Google then that was the better deal.
A potential client of ours was shocked when we quoted a substantial 5 figure sum for SEO last week. His main rival makes £5 million a year from organic search. He said he couldn’t afford to pay our fees – I said he couldn’t afford not to pay them.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Great post.
I have paid for SEO in the past, but enjoy the challenge of doing it myself (And saving some money).
Which industry was this guy in? (For the 5 figure quote?)…
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I can’t really say the industry but we don’t take on any clients less than £1k a month.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThe old adage still holds – you get what you pay for. I personally would never go cheap for something important to my business.
Great analogy Patrick.
This was a really great post! I’ve been saying the same thing for a while now, but never really had a similar story to relate it to! Good job!
What about the 5th man who went online, got an excellent deal on a quality suit for 75 pounds, and save the last 25 pounds on a fine meal w/ drinks for himself and the interviewer? That sounds like the better play :.)
Good post!
We do our own seo, but we did have an seo consulting company before. I reckon over the past 5 years we have spent in excess of £1 million in search related work on only about 5 sites.
Take your money and make your choice.
Doug
We don’t take on contracts less then 2,500 a month it will soon be 5k. Just becuase the fact is you have to have to charge to provide good services or at least I should say to get results becuase you want great results!
Third man sounds familiar, Iv learned that lesson on my skin.
Well said..
Hi Patrick,
I like that 4 men story. I never reduce my price for compromising my services. If someone care too much on the price, they are not good customer, so just let them go.
Hi Patrick
I recognize the story. We have excactly the same picture in Denmark, but it seems like it is “loosing up” a bit lately. More end more companies seem to be willing to pay the amount needed. Few years ago a 50.000 DKK contract were for the large companies only. Now that amount is spent by smaller companies and the large scale contracts are worth at least DKK 250.000 a year. 1£ equals aprox. 10 DKK.
I often tell my clients: WYPIWYG (What You Pay Is What You Get).
I do not dabble with the heavy SEO, I would if someone asked. The SEO I do for my clients is quite basic, yet gets the results. I do mostly small businesses web design, branding and hosting and their business is usually geographically dependent (Glasgow,Scotland etc etc). All their websites draw ‘quality’ hits and all have made money off their website. I aggree with the post but probably only relates to nationwide or worldwide customers. I also think people who should read this are the smaller clients who either hold on to their cash or don’t have the cash for +2K/month SEO. However, they also don’t really need it unless they really want to expand bigtime!
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