How Much Does SEO Cost & How Clients Should Budget in 2020

source: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01bed82ad79b77729d/

Here’s my Upwork profile for reference. I’ve generated many clients and done over 93 jobs  and 2,607 hours of work on Upwork to generate a nice living on Upwork alone (hint to any SEO entrepreneurs or wantrepreneurs who want to dive in).

From the profile though, you can see the models I primarily work off of – hourly or retainer.

Why I off the hourly or retainer model is sometimes clients are NOT good clients. Like any business relationship, partnership is required from all sides to make things work and go smoothly. Too often I’ve had clients who are unresponsive or do not take the advice I give them or will not allow the changes to a page we need to help improve the rankings.

Models 3 and 4 would actually create a liability for me, especially with new clients.

So I’ll go into the costs both to me and to the client now below, looking at each model.

This is the model most popular with people who need consulting, small jobs, want to see how I work or don’t have large budgets.

My hourly pay has gone up over the years after starting at $50/hour and going up to where it is now at $100. Above I mentioned the average is $75/hour – $150/hour but that was mostly the rate agencies would charge. Many SEO’s in the US range from the $25/hour – $75/hour range and can be found on Upwork with similar fees. You can see the range here although they don’t have very good reviews:

The hourly SEO model works for maybe things that are more technical or a technical audit, questions or strategies people have or looking into competitive analyses. Generally I would budget about 10 hours for this model so take their hourly rate and budget for 10 hours as your top end budget. Typically a competitive analysis or a site audit on a small site can be conducted in that time frame.

As an SEO, I would sell 10 hours or have the client budget out about 10 hours. Often times ancillary questions or needs come up and to provide a complete service you want to bake in phone calls and follow ups so the client has a number in their head that you can fulfill on for any extras they will have (and they have them).

This is model that many of my clients have and the range for this goes from $500/month – $3000/month with the average being $1250 – $1500/month. This is also the model for people looking to rank keywords in the top spots of Google versus looking for advice, strategies, competitive analyses and technical reviews.

The model for this can be looked at as a multiple of the SEO freelancers or agencies rate but these typically has additional costs that go into it (primarily content creation or backlinking). Upwork is generally where I will see hourly engagements but the retainer model will be sourced more often from more stable and successful businesses.

For SEOs, I often get those clients through my “Los Angeles SEO“, “San Francisco SEO” and “New York SEO” pages. Having and ranking a local SEO page to attract larger businesses is where many of my retainer clients come from.

The real reason why the retainer model is necessary is the time and costs can vary month to month but this variance is necessary. Content creation and link building or external PR is what will help boost your sites ranking and both of these come with a cost in terms of time or actual money.

For a $1000 per month retainer, easily $250-$500 may go to outgoing expenses in terms of content creation and external PR. The balance then will still be time that is being spent on the account.

So I may be spending fewer hours (if my hourly rate is $100/hour) than the value of the contract but the costs of ranking in the retainer model bring down the end value to me as the SEO. So maybe I spend 5-7 hours on the account each month but I only have $500 left in take home from a $1000/month contract after expenses.

This is why the retainer model works the way that it does – costs unknown to the businesses that the SEO agency or freelancer has to account for and impacts overall profitability.