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Pricing Models
January 3rd, 2012 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Consulting
Near the end of December 2011, we ran a survey on this blog asking consultants and agencies
of all sizes and geographies to contribute their pricing models and cost structures. I'm pleased to
share the results of that survey in the hopes that it will give everyone in the search industry a
better idea of the range of fees and the services provided.
Obviously, this data is imperfect - SEOmoz is not a professional data surveying firm and our only
tool was a basic list of questions on SurveyMonkey. That said, I'd be surprised if a professional
surveyor found dramatically different data - there was enough participation to receive a
trustworthy sample size and firms provided their personal/contact information (many of which I
recognized while digging through the responses, but obviously will not be sharing identities
publicly), which means we likely did not receive intentionally manipulative/misleading information.
The data is provided below in three formats - first, some personal, high level takeaways from the
survey, next an infographic from the great folks at AYTM Market Research and finally, a dump of
the responses in CSV and Excel formats (without any personally identifiable info).
Canada - 34 respondents
Germany/France/Italy/Netherlands - 34 respondents
India - 31 respondents
Many countries had 1-3 respondents and while we certainly appreciate those contributions, it's
our feeling that sharing this data could actually be misleading/non-productive as a single
firm/consultant could dramatically skew the results. All the information in this blog post, the
infographic and the Excel data dump are split into those 6 regions.
Top 9 Takeaways
These are my personal takeaways from the data:
1.
Hourly SEO Costs Vary Across Countries, but $76-$200/hour is Most Common
With the exception of India (the only developing region that was well-represented in our
survey), hourly costs of $76-$200 (representing three responses) covered 50%+ of all firms.
It was highest in Australia/New Zealand at 62%, followed by 58.1% in the US and 56% in
Canada. Granted, this is a wide range, but it provides the answer to a frequently-asked
question from those seeking SEO services for the first time.
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2.
3.
4.
provide "hands-on link building." Clearly, hands-on help is still very popular.
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5.
6.
7.
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8.
aspirationally) often offer services to small and medium businesses. 41% of respondents
offer consulting to small, hyperlocal businesses, e.g. the restaurant around the corner.
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9.
I'm certain others perusing the data will find other interesting takeaways (hope to read some of
those in the comments).
2.
The individual results contain personally identifiable information, and even without the
emails/company names, the details of location, services, pricing, etc. could be used to determine
an individual consulting firm's identity. Given that we promised anonymity when launching the
survey, I felt that providing this data, while valuable, wasn't appropriate. If you have specific filters
you'd like to see applied, please let us know in the comments and we'll try to make that happen.
Many thanks to everyone who participated in this survey. In the next few months, SEOmoz will be
launching a redux of our 2010 Industry Survey, which will hopefully provide even more detailed
information across all parts of the search, social and inbound marketing fields. Stay tuned!