Thinking of Starting a SEO Service.

23 replies
  • SEO
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A few weeks ago I hurt my back at work. At this time I am wating on legal matters and awaiting for a MRI and trying to get my documents in order.
I tried going to work today, but I couldn't do the simplest of physical task as well my mobility is limited to boot. My employer sent me home as I am a liability and told me not to return till I was 100%.

So right now I have no actual income and things are getting a bit tight. My wife is worried, I am worried because it looks like I will have to make a career change fast.

I have one major niche project in the the early phase and it is service related. So income from this will be slow going.

I have a few adsense/amazon sites that I have just started in which just finished up. I do not expect a landslide of money from these, just residual income.

I been thinking of starting a SEO service. This I enjoy, but I am unfamiliar with the business side as to which what I should charge. Any pointers in this area would be greatly appreciated.
#seo #service #starting #thinking
  • Profile picture of the author Cataclysm1987
    My advice would be to call 20-30 highly successful, established firms, pretend to be a prospective customers, make notes of their pricing, make notes of their proposals, closing strategies and marketing tactics, then model your own site and sales funnel after these observations.

    I know a guy who is making millions from this by competing on Adwords with 2 full time sales staff and a bunch of link builders.

    I also recommend doing direct mailing with services like this:

    Mailing List - Email, Business, Sales Leads, Consumer - InfoUSA
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  • Profile picture of the author John Romaine
    Hi Chris, check the site in my signature "start an seo business". Ive got quite a few articles there that might help you.
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  • Profile picture of the author johnben1444
    Browse Google for the top SEO companies and see what they offer, start with something much less because you are not well known yet.
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  • Profile picture of the author mosthost
    I think you should consider 'social media marketing' instead. It's less 'trackable' for the end users and still fresh in their minds.
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  • Profile picture of the author savvybizbuilder
    Check out some SEO sites that displays their amount of charges in each services.
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    • Profile picture of the author apostlebrian
      -"There are many good SEO available in market, thought you can't rely on all of them, as it involves your hard earned money. Though I used to do SEO by myself and currently has 4 websites for 3 keywords each as first result(ofcourse first page). Now I'm busy doing other marketing stuff I've given my work to trafficwine.com, and so far I'm satisfied with their services. You can google more for SEO, but I find them reasonably price with good quality. Incase you find better than them, don't forget to post your comments, so that I can sign up."

      Thanks
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      • Profile picture of the author akmal85
        Good luck! Feel free to offer your service with special price in this forum later =)
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      • Profile picture of the author apostleharris
        I highly recommend trafficwine.com! Fast, reliable...and all the other good stuff...not expensive at all and so far they have been very effective. try it!
        H
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  • Profile picture of the author Rukshan
    Hi chris,

    Sorry to hear about your situation. You can easily learn latest SEO trends and test it with your site. Identify a working model and start a service in Warriors for hire section. In the mean time, You can complete some of orders at fiverr to cover some charges. Fiverr is a great place to cover the cost of SEO tools. For an example you can offer a gigs related to Blog Commenting by Scrapebox, Article Submission by AMR and Social Bookmarking by BMD etc

    Combine latest SEO tools and offer a service here and other main forums.

    Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author Thomas Michal
    Originally Posted by Chris Silvey View Post

    So right now I have no actual income and things are getting a bit tight.
    I don't want to crush your dreams or anything, but in your current position I'd say DON'T start a business unless you have money to live off of.

    Originally Posted by Chris Silvey View Post

    I been thinking of starting a SEO service. This I enjoy, but I am unfamiliar with the business side as to which what I should charge. Any pointers in this area would be greatly appreciated.
    Right when I hear you say "I am unfamiliar with the business side" it raises a red flag into whether or not you are qualified enough to even offer a SEO service... As someone that owns and operates a new media agency I'd say there is no "one" price I charge flat out because everyone needs are different.

    BUT... to answer your specific question here are some good infographics put together by seomoz detailing things you'd probably find interesting:

    http://aytm.com/press/IG/SEO-cost_1.png
    ( If the photo is small click on it to enlarge it.)

    and here is the article:

    SEO Pricing: 600+ Agencies Share Costs of Services & Pricing Models | SEOmoz

    BTW... you can also use this site next time to do some general market research:

    seo cost - Google Search

    Good luck!
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    • Profile picture of the author jimmymc
      Sorry about your situation.

      Checkout local websites for businesses in your area. Pick a couple of bad ones and build a new much better site for that company on a sub-domain as a demo.

      Use your seo magic to get it ranked above other local competitive sites. Then go sell it to the business along with a contract for continued seo, maintenance and expansion. Then transfer the site to their domain. Plumbers, roofers, mechanics and a/c contractors are good targets.

      You won't get them all but you will get more than you think.
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  • Profile picture of the author Peter Lessard
    Keep your chin up Chris! Make up your mind firmly that this is an opportunity in disguise and a few years from now you will look back and say how lucky was I that this event changed my course.

    Let me share some secrets with you as to why you can succeed at this:

    1. There is a stupid amount of money available at ALL times from local business.
    2. As a Warrior here and with the sites you already own and your current knowledge you already know more about IM than 99.9% of business owners.
    3. For 10 bucks all over this forum you can buy plug and play marketing packages that will make you "look" professional.
    4. You can rest assured that EVERY day some business owner is buying some expensive marketing thingy from someone with no intention of delivering value.

    Since you are a mature individual with a strong work ethic (I surmise this from you going to work injured!) you will already mesh well with business owners that just want someone to care to deliver something of value.

    NOW ABOUT PRICING

    This part drives me so crazy I am starting a site about this soon sharing my experience.
    My last client paid me 100k!
    A previous client paid me 25k just for a consultation!
    Why?
    As long as the price is less than the value you will add there is no limit and I NEVER take a job unless I am certain that the business owner will profit far beyond what I charge them.

    Let me give you a down to earth example.
    With your knowledge or a bit of research could you build a quick wordress blog and get it to rank for "[city] asphalt paving contractors" or a bit more work and "[city] paving contractors" or how about getting a youtube video to rank for those?

    One closed sale for paving to such a contractor is worth 3k and up.
    Why then should a nice package of a keyword match site, twitter account, youtube channel not be worth $1,500 to them? How about giving them a $500 discount if when you get any of it to page one they give you a video testimonial?

    I have made $10,000 weekly with this exact method in various niches!
    The trick is at first you sorta work your butt off, then you outsource 99% of it and later you live a life you only ever imagined!

    I truly have found the biggest obstacle to making money online is making up your mind that you can! The only obstacle to getting 10k checks is being willing to ask for them because if you are a man of good conscience you will make sure you deliver the value they paid for. People often worry but can I deliver. The answer is if you are getting paid well enough you will have the opportunity to invest the proper time to ensure your client is happy! The reason most marketing sucks is because people do not charge enough to deliver quality. Do you think if a client paid me 100k that I was strapped for time to help him? Or that there was any resource I could not buy and utilize to guarantee his success?

    Good luck Chris!
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  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    Sorry about your accident at work. Hope you get well soon. They say services are the fastest way to make money online, but if you want to start an SEO service, you will need to provide case studies of people you have helped, or if you dont have any clients yet... show proof of your website(s) rankings that rank high on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
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  • Profile picture of the author rooze
    As Randall points out above, you'll need to have some credentials and some kind of track-record and/or references if you're going to land good clients. Otherwise you might pull some work from mom and pop businesses who don't know what questions to ask.

    If you have real knowledge you could try contacting some of the SEO companies already with a client base. Sometimes they'll outsource projects, or break a project down into smaller parcels and have outsources do the work.

    Good luck with your predicament, hope it works out.
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  • Profile picture of the author Baadier Sydow
    My advice would not to try and do everything possible. Sure you can do web work and re-sell a theme from Themeforrest but you want to have career satisfaction too. Do the SEO and just do that. Im not saying turn away from other business if its on the table but try and have 1 focus and build expert status for it.
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    • Profile picture of the author Chris Silvey
      First of all I would like to thank you all for your very helpful advice.

      I just got off a gotomeeting with my brother and our clients. We are building a blog network for their use. They were impressed just by the organic info. Over 60% returning visitors, low bounce rate (could be lower) at 33% and average over 7 minutes on the site. For what little content we have right now on the site, that's pretty good. We will be also adding a live chat feature for them to catch a few visitors. All in all , everyone was motivated and things will be pushed into hyper mode.

      In the meantime I guess I'll start on the low end and do some competition analysis gigs on fiverr. Enough I wager to hold us over till things fall into place.

      Thanks all. I feel better and no it isn't the pain killers
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  • Profile picture of the author Andyhenry
    Sorry about your situation - just make sure you really do know what you're doing.

    It's easy for people to say "you already know more than 99.9% of businesses" but that's irrelevant.

    When you're doing this for yourself it's easy to cut corners and use tools that do comment spamming or use link networks but if you use those things for clients and their site gets Google slapped you'd better have a good answer to why you did it.

    Be careful what advice you follow if you're charging people for results.
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  • Profile picture of the author scottmacair
    My advice Chris - don't do it. No offence intended here mate but you probably don't know what you're doing with SEO and i can't believe people are recommending you Fiverr.

    I'm stunned at how many Warriors have some success ranking a site with cheap warrior SEO services then change their avatar title to 'SEO Grand Master' etc. The optimism is endearing but the truth is most people here don't really know much about quality SEO.

    Many people here selling SEO services or reselling other SEO services are now having to explain to clients why they all have Unnatural Links Detected Notices in their Google Webmaster Tools. Have you considered how you will explain that when you inadvertently tank a successful business?

    Google change the goal posts all the time and a method that works this year may actually become a negative the next.

    You mentioned building a blog network - many of these have been busted lately and the websites linked to from the blogs have received penalty notices from Google. Have you considered the risk you are taking and does the client know the risks?
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  • Profile picture of the author ultimates
    Chris, sorry to hear about your accident. Hope the best outcome for you.

    Getting into SEO now is a bit harder then it use to be a year ago. Things have changed. But, there is a bright side to it. You would not be carrying over and bad habits to get websites ranked the wrong way. You would be learning with Google's panda update that was made in 2011.

    My suggestion to you. Start out small. Gigs on fiverr is perfect way to get into it.

    Hope you make some additional income online. If SEO does not workout for you, then look into other possibilities.

    Best success
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  • Profile picture of the author Seo Mall
    Hi, Chris! Become our ressller if you are interested in SEO. We're starting our business partner program) Just read section "Make money with us" on our site.

    I hope, your back will be ok! Take care.
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    Seomall.net - All SEO Services start at $4.49 - High PR Backlinks, FB fans, Twitter Followers, Ready Websites, Design, Copywriting, Guides and much more
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  • Profile picture of the author ghedman
    The Seo Service indeed very good choice, i do earn money from "Seo Service" but sometime i want to come out from this bussines -_-
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