I think the best way to deal with this is by charging the cost of number of hours.As SEO is a dynamic field, you can't ensure the results.

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Yes if you go with that model then you have to explain that they are paying for hours/work done. Then they will see the worth.

Or if you are confident enough of your service, and a high enough hit rate so much so that you are able to cover up your loses for those miss rates then you can offer a performance system where you charge them for the rankings.

if you are interested in that hit me up. we can discuss a possible partnership. =)

This is a good question and one I ask myself frequently, the reason being that many of my AdWords/PPC clients are asking about SEO services. I'm finding that SEO is *much* easier to sell vs. AdWords management, since with AdWords they still have to pay Google for the traffic on top of my management fees.

You could try and chat with him and find out what a page one ranking is actually worth to him. If it will generate $500 a month in sales, he won't be too happy about paying you $600 a month.

On the other hand, if it's going to generate him $60,000 a month, then you won't be happy about charging him $600 a month. Find out first what it is worth to him and go from there. That's what I'd do.

talk with the client before you come up with pricing. If you charge by the hour, you're still going to need to provide some type of number of hours 'you' think it's going to take you to accomplish the task.

If you charge per month, simply outline what work is included, and what you hope it will accomplish for the client's site. Explain that nothing is guaranteed with SEO, although you'll try your hardest to create the results they're after.

I believe there are two acceptable and still great patterns to stick with when it comes to setting price tags to the custom SEO projects; the first one is per project which means requesting some amounts of money and then explaining what will be done for the customers. The second option could be per month which seems to be liked by many people and webmasters because they would like to examine the results on a constant basis and decide about future payments.

In some cases, using monthly payments and patterns can be the only possibly and available option, like when in some highly competitive niches, there is the need to rent some links on many directories or reserving advertisement spots on certain sites. Naturally, since there will be the need to renew the linking profiles per month to make sure they will remain active, so the clients will be demanded to spend some amounts of cash per month to keep those links active online.

I was quoted $1500AU to set up and $300AU per month maintenance. Thats when I decided to learn this myself!

Okay, awesome tips here!

Yes, I agree, hourly is definitely the better and safer way to go, but it's also the hardest to sell no doubt. I think having a well detailed proposal, showing some proof and building rapport will go a long way in the trust factor in order to make this happen.

Also, as Adam points out to "take a small hit" for a short period in the beginning in order to ease into an ongoing gig.