Seo Services Billing Practices Options

[SEMMatt]

Hello, I'm curious to know how others do their billing. Do you charge an upfront fee, after services are completed, incremental? Any standards?

Thanks,
Matt

[qwerty]

I think this is fairly unusual, but I charge on a weekly basis, itemizing the work I did that week. I don't charge in advance for anything, and I don't charge any maintenance fees.

[Jill]

Depends on the service, but generally we charge up front fees. If it's very expensive, we might break it into 2 parts. One due up front and one after.

[nethy]

As far as I know there are no standards really.

Many of the larger service providers of 'seo' (generally lower cost services provided as a tag-on to hosting etc) offer fixed price packages.

The Small & medium 'consultant' modeled businesses tend to prefer to bill by the hour (like acountants). This can be relatively difficult to sell, though, to small businesses.

The odd runners tie their pay to their success. IE $200 per keyword in the top 10- or something. Obviously this doesn't do a good job of aligning client/vendor interests. But it sounds like it does, so it tends to be used by some shady vendors.
That said, there is nothing to stop a vendor from setting payment level accourding to success as measured by traffic or (where appropriate) sales, as Jill recomends measuring seo success. Obviously, there is room for mannipulation and/or argument on both the client & the vendor side here. But this is not an inherently dodgy practice.

The way I see it, Its not just a question of pricing. Develping a business practice for billing & pricing clients is going to be a pretty substantial factor in your relationship with clients.

[Jill]

Found an old 1999 document of mine on my 'puter today showing my invoices for full SEO services for a few companies at...wait for it...$450! (Yep, that's it for the whole thing.) Those companies made so much on that $450 investment...ahh the good old days.

[Nueromancer]

normaly an upfront one off fee (if we are taking on a new site) to fix the major problems and then ongoing monthly fees for reporting and ongoing work.