How much to hire an SEO consultant?

Send me a PM Brandon... or email me at info(at)rankhigherwithseo(dot)com
Brian

Well I used what I learned and parlayed it into a nice additional sideline income stream with private clients so it was well worth it. But I charge an amount that makes it worth it to me and it is not inexpensive. So I guess it depends on your budget if you want to learn to do it yourself or outsource.

Hi brandon,

I would definitely look at the option of outsourcing it to people who know their SEO and are based on countries such as india or the philippines.

Maybe I can help you out. Check my sig and drop me a PM.

All the best,
-Yan Kirby

I think prices depend on what you need done. There are different things that are part of SEO and many companies and individuals who offer these services. I suggest that you ask to see customer ratings and satisfaction. I did not have to pay for mine because my husband did it, but he knows of a lot of people that call themselves experts and do terrible work.

Does someone can post the right figure?

there are plenty of people who here can offer such a deal to you.
I will send you a PM to talk about this of what you actually needs.

I would save the money and check this place out:

Adsense / PPC / SEO Discussion Forum

Chew the meat and spit out the bones.

SEO is going to range all over the board. I've been the directory of SEO for one of the largest SEO companies, as well as starting 2 different SEO/Internet Marketing companies. I've had clients at $200 a month, as well as over 6 figures a month. It always depends on the competitiveness of the industry you're looking to rank for and what it's going to take on the link building side. My average price per job is around $2k a month, typically for about 3-6 months.

SEO, once understood is easier than you think

A good start would be to get the FREE Official Google SEO Starters Guide here:
FREE Official Google SEO Starter Guide | Saint Eve Marketing
which is used by Google's own employees as a guideline

We was hiring people on Phillipines for $600/month/person - full time.

However I strongly recommend you to follow these steps:

1. Learn about SEO as much as you can by yourself.
2. Hire different people for different parts of SEO (linkbuilding, your site rebuilding etc.) and CONTROLL them with your knowledge - so they will not cheat you.
3. This way you will save lot of money, otherwise you will hear only excusess why it is not working and why you have to pay more.

Good luck.

Hi Brandon,

I would like to further discuss this project with you. I suggest you lease one of our staff to handle this job. The staff will be doing white hat methods and you will be seeing the results gradually until you reach page 1 of Google SERP. Please check your PM for more information.

Brandon,
The truth is this: SEO is multi-faceted. There is Page Optimization which involves title, content layout, headings, etc. and there is Site Optimization which would include link building, social marketing, directory listings, article marketing, and more. Page Optimization would be less expensive but, just because a page is optimized, it does not mean it will rank well with search engines because your competition may employ many more "traffic" strategies.

I would recommend you safe hundreds of dollars and read a SEO guide.

Search Engine Optimization is really easier than you think. I looked at some free SEO videos and the first site I made showed up as the #1 result in 24 hours. Look for free resources on this if you have the time to do it yourself. George Brown has some good free videos on SEO, on his website.

Knowing what to do with SEO is not so hard - the subject is
written about so often and many methods are in print.

The fact is SEO is tedious and time-consuming. Your costs
will be mostly in implementation, not planning.

That said, there's a lot more to getting traffic to turn into
buyers than SEO positioning.

Thanks reynoldscorb,

I don't want to hire SEO service actually.
As I did just what you said, and thought myself on my own.

It's really easy to learn once you find the right sources.


Though I am still interested in knowing if anyone knew the Costs of such a task.
Who knows, maybe I'll be providing this service to some of my Clients soon

I read "How much to hire an SEO consultant?" as the Title, so just wanted to see what answers would be posted here.

Thanks,

It's a good idea to find an SEO company that would prepare a competitive analysis or an Organic SEO Blueprint (cough cough)...but honestly, even though I do those for clients that allow them to run their own SEO operation if they're up to the task...I'm sure there are others out there that provide this level of service as well.

I think you have to be careful when looking for an 'SEO expert'. There are many people (some here on WF) that claim to be SEO experts, but don't know any more than the average person.

As i'm sure you've noticed, there is no shortage of people looking to work with you. The key is to do the proper due diligence to find the right person. You have SEO knowledge yourself, so you will know the kind of questions you should be asking and what kinds of answers are red flags.

Throw and ad up on Kijiji and Craigslist and check out oDesk.com as well....I guarantee you'll have 500 or more applicants in a week. You'll be able to weed out 85% right away to leave you with the ones that actually know what to do. Then you can make your choice based on price, experience and services provided to find your consultant. It takes time, but it will all be worth it in the end.

Quality services will probably fall in the range of $500 to $1500 per month

Good luck!

Kevin

A good white hat SEO specialist could range from anywhere between $1k-10k per month.

It just depends on what type of strategy your website needs. It's also relative to your niche and how competitive it is to achieve rankings for your keywords.

Surely the price will vary a lot depending on how competitive a niche you have chosen some niches require a lot more work than others.

The cost?

For the 90% of those who claim to be SEO experts: Too damn much
For the other 10% who actually are: Whatever it takes

Tsnyder

Veretekk offers SEO training for free, and you can do it yourself or train someone you already have to do it. PM me if you want to check it out.

As for outsourcing, I have tried it once or twice and different opinions and ideas of what was right seem to be everywhere. As such, niether of my projects were successful until I took it over myself after a bit of training. It sounds like your making your own sites now or having someone do them and if that is the case if you know what your doing with SEO then its easier to provide direction to your developers.

I would seriously recommend looking at George Brown's free video on SEO. After watching that video, I made a WP blog and it was the #1 search result for 3 keyword phrases. I worked on the content for about an hour and haven't touched it since. Four months later and it's still #1

Brandon, guys,

Let's cut the crap, shall we:

What's the Market you want to Rank for?
What's YOUR monthly budget?
How's Competition? New? Aged?
What's their monthly budget?
How Long do you want to stay on top?
Exclusivity Contract or not?
etc...

Answer me these questions and I'll drop a figure. Otherwise it's just a hit in the dark which leads to failure.

Fernando

@Clint Butler @LilBlackDress I am not able to PM you, but I am interested in the resources you both mention. I am learning to start SEO after hiring 2 so called SEO experts.

Try rank pay which is pay for performance.

You only pay if they rank you.

Prices vary from $200-$2k per keyword per month for top three rank. Depends on keyword volume, current competition and your sites current page rank.

Hey,

you might find this a useful resource: Download SEO Fast Start 2009 - The Best SEO Book Is Free which is a completely free book by Dan Thies. It covers pretty much everything you would want to know including:

Keywords
Optimising site structure and pages
Link building and promotion
Measuring your results
etc, etc, etc

(Lol, I promise I'm not on commission for him!?!) It really demystified things for me though.

Jack

If anyone is still looking I know a rank pay company that charges $150/month, and this is mainly for OFFLINERS - they will give you a branded report with your logo to give to the client too

Mubarak

Murback, can you pm the company?

Jack T, thanks I will read through it.

Currently, I have read google's SEO guide and went through the Firestorm SEO Course

If you're looking for real-life prices...

What I do right now is charge a $2000 setup fee and about $1000 per month after that for my clients.

For that they get:

1) a comprehensive review of their existing site. (helping them do on-page optimization first)
2) heavy-duty keyword research. I find the best set of phrases to go after...phrases that will actually bring traffic that can convert. I also evaluate the competition...mostly for my sake. I look for phrases that will not only yield an increase in traffic and conversions, but ones that won't kill me trying to get ranked on page one.

For the $1000 per month, we pick about 5-10 phrases to target. If they wanted more, the price would go up.

3) on-going link-building. White hat mostly. ;-) I occasionally outsource some backlinking and if you consider blog comments and forum profiles grey-hat, then I'm partially grey-hat. also article marketing, video marketing, social marketing, press releases, etc.

4) monthly reporting. I provide a monthly progress report that tracks the increase in backlinks, and shows where the site is ranking in the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Bing), for each phrase. I also evaluate their Google Analytics to show where the traffic gains are coming from, and make recommended next steps.

So, FWIW, that's one man's example of a pricing structure and what you get for it.

If you want to learn seo try SEO Book.com ~ SEO Training Made Easy
YouTube - GoogleWebmasterHelp's Channel

SEO is pretty easy and unless your websites are totally static then it is an ongoing process so you are much better off learning for yourself

I have clients who pay as much as $5K monthly and some as little as $200. For me it depends on how much time I'm going to have to spend on their project to generate the results they're looking for. In my humble opinion SEO is easy in theory but in practice, it's very tedious and time consuming if you're in competitive markets and have to produce results.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards,

Ben

One more thing, it has to be a long term strategy if you want your website or online business to last.