Local Business SEO Journal
- Thread starter phoenixrising
- Start date
A three figure sum is the base tag that SEO professionals charge. Check out to see the financial situation of the company. New companies do not mind paying to get started. Older ones will want to cut costs. Also you need to prepare two quotes for them. One - a time oriented quote and 2 - a result oriented quote. Giving them options is always the best way to go. Make sure that whatever you charge them is providing you a net profit of atleast 25% for the first six months and around 75% for later. If you are working alone on this, make sure you dont tell your client that. You can get a fair idea of what rates are like by having a look at the BST section. Optimization can be a pain in the ass if your'e doing it wrong. So make sure you are prepared to cut your losses as well. You will also need to take into consideration from which part of the world you are from and which part your client is from.
I would recommend $299 a month if the keywords are not too tough to handle.
I would recommend $299 a month if the keywords are not too tough to handle.
Worth a try, though people often ignore these.
To do something similar for website visitors, it should be a fairly simple matter to pass the search terms to the contact form.
That way every customer (if they dont use the phone) that contacts him via the site will automatically send their search terms.
You can set this up to be included in the email he gets, or just in one to your self.
I think i have a current customers site set up like this using contact form 7 (excellent WP plug in). If i can find it i'll post more details if your interested.
Also get some tracking on the site asap, might a well use GA but set them up with their own account. That way you can monitor all sorts of things for yourself, and send them monthly updates along with your invoice.
Great to see you getting your local SEO business started. Inspiration for others who are yet to take the leap and start a business of their own.
If you want some really awesome tracking for visitors and keywords, one that I use is getclicky.com. Even though it's not free, the amount of detail it goes down to for each individual visitor is awesome. Well worth the money imo.
If you want some really awesome tracking for visitors and keywords, one that I use is getclicky.com. Even though it's not free, the amount of detail it goes down to for each individual visitor is awesome. Well worth the money imo.
Glad to hear exact matches are still pwning. Supposedly, they might be losing their mojo soon. I've got one now that I just started with last week, fairly competitive (for local) is already on page 2 for bing and yahoo but not in the top 500 on google yet so I was concerned this exact match thing had already started.
Perhaps I should give it more than a week before wigging myself out :-/
Perhaps I should give it more than a week before wigging myself out :-/
google has been slow as fuck lately. make sure you get some amit bookmarks on your site asap to get it out in the open and on the radar
i know you dont have the wp-admin u/p but do you have the hosting auths? if you do, you can do a db rewrite and if the site is as simple as you say, you can just wipe it clean and throw up a new site in minutes...
just lookin out. my local seo company has been up and running for a few months now, let me know if you want to exchange ideas. ive made some mistakes but have also had some great ideas that got me some good clients.
just lookin out. my local seo company has been up and running for a few months now, let me know if you want to exchange ideas. ive made some mistakes but have also had some great ideas that got me some good clients.
I primarily work in local. Have you considered call tracking? In my experiences calls occur 4-5 times the amount of email submits. It allows much more accurate tracking of progress - especially if you serve a different phone number per medium (organic & paid).
Amit's the first guy i go to with a new site. Have since done dfb, blg, Matt and Jason's service that doesn't have an acronym that I know of, linkilicious...all of this has gotten me to 4 and 5 on yahoo and bing but only 134 on google for one keyword and still not on the map for the other main ones.
Google is the ultimate cockblocker.
(Oh and +1 for the call tracker. )
Are you layering your BLG blasts? I found great results by creating initial squidoo, wordpress, blogger (Tier 1) etc. then blasting those with interlinked BLG blasts day 1 (Tier 2) then using the variable in day 2 and interlinking Tier 1 and Tier 2, then following up with Profile/comment/xrumer blasts.
For local it has worked a charm, front paged for keyword + city (albeit not competitive) but with no keywords in the domain.
Then I wrinse repeat for important pages in the site (services, individual service/product pages) to solidify rankings.
> u know of any call tracking for spain, france and the uk?
Call Measurement, Call Tracking and Call Reporting by Calltracks
Not used them - they're probably really expensive.
If you get pricing info post back or PM me, especially if they are any good.
I'm currently looking into whether a SkypeIn number could be used for cheap, simple call-tracking. All I really want to know is how many phone leads a website generates for a client. It can't be that difficult!
Call Measurement, Call Tracking and Call Reporting by Calltracks
Not used them - they're probably really expensive.
If you get pricing info post back or PM me, especially if they are any good.
I'm currently looking into whether a SkypeIn number could be used for cheap, simple call-tracking. All I really want to know is how many phone leads a website generates for a client. It can't be that difficult!
I can buy a phone number that matches a local area code or use a toll free 1800 number. I've tried both, and found that people are more willing to call a local number than a 1800 number, at least for my niches.
phoenix congrats on the client and thanks for creating and updating this thread.
In regards to the extended delays of getting a simple login id and pw something doesn't sound right. You mentioned that the current site basically has nothing to salvage. If another delay occurs I would take control of the hosting for the client and and point the domain name to the new server. Maybe I'm miss-understanding the situation but the multiple delays for simple login info smells.
Whatever you do make sure don't lose any current rankings with your updates and additions. 301 / .htaccess / etc to protect what you have so far.
As far as pricing I internally forecast my time, effort and expensives involved to achieve the objective and make sure my min hourly rate is met plus a margin. This is given to the client as a package price based on attainable results met not as an hourly rate. I personally prefer to work off of a set price vs. hourly whenever possible. Wish I could give $ examples but every clients website complexity seems to vary and the competition determines the effort needed to break into the top 3. I also weigh all of this against the business they are not getting presently. Then what it will mean to the owner by getting even the low end prediction of highly targeted traffic. Sounds like your client doesn't need any convincing of the impact so you are 3/4's of the way there. Don't short change yourself on the price and be careful how you phrase potential results.
I've had good success with local in a couple of different regions but I also don't consider myself an expert. So take the above with a ton of sodium.
Like the 3 and 4 day projects? Or are you talking about a different method?
And yes I do that.
Seems pretty straight-forward to me:
The designer doesn't want to lose his unsuspecting customer by having someone with skills/experience (in this case, phoenix) point out what a weaksauce site s/he put together. When I take over sites from other hosts, getting the credentials takes a simple phone call (since trading such info over email is admittedly much riskier).
@Phoenixrising: while I really hope it's just a misunderstanding and that you do get the admin info, I wouldn't be surprised if you got stiffed again.
He who controls the DNS trumps all others. If your client has the domain on his credit card then even if he doesn't have the registrar login details he can get them. Setup new hosting and point the DNS to the new server. I would seek council with the elders here about the best way to keep the juice just to be safe.
However with the new information that the owner just dropped the ball on emailing the guy hopefully that can be avoided.