Matt – thanks! And, keep me posted on how your process evolves. We’re still coming into our own, I change things up almost daily, which probably drives the clients crazy except that things get better and better.

Sashi – good point about confusing clients. As soon as you present them with something, they come to expect it regardless of the actual value. Do both of yourselves the favor and start simple growing into your rhythm from there. Of course automation is the key to gettin’ paid! Find the sweet spot.

We price by time and scope. Bigger problem = more time and more brain power.

We soon found that that approach only served to confuse the hell out of clients and bombarding them with 100 pages was a ridiculous idea in the first place.

They’re now all hand written and only relevant material is brought up. Again as above, pricing for them is the most difficult part, as people can get 300 page reports for £50 ($80 or so) but ours are now usually less than 10% of that size.

Do you price for the time that goes into one of your reports or just assign it a standard price based on the size of the site, or even just a fixed price?

RE writing something subliminal in your work to see what effect it has, I’ve done the same with a teacher I used to have, I even took it a step further and drew something in the middle of my text that they didn’t notice on a longer piece!

Re: Ian’s point, think we’ve all had that before. I’ve seen huge-looking documents with just 1 paragraph of large type on each page, just to pad it out so it looks like they’ve done more preparation. Thankfully most clients see past it, and as you say, those that don’t are probably best avoided!

More posts like this please!

Ian – sounds like you were better off. It’s like having a professor that assigns grades based on the number of pages you typed rather than the quality of the work. I had one of those back in the day and literally put this in the middle of the paper, “you aren’t even reading this are you? I could write anything in the world and you’d never know.” I got an A on the paper. How ridiculous is that?

Call me a nerd, but I got pissed and wrote the professor a negative review after the semester. I’m sure other students were cursing me, but when it comes to my education, I paid for it and I was getting crap in return. Yet again why education means nothing when looking for a good SEO and why it’s most important to look for a personalized audit. Definitely better off without the page counters!

“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”

Start low and scale it up. I think many SEOs data overload the client (the list here is fine as a checklist, but you share that with the clients and you start taking the client back to the days of just looking for keyword positions as an indicator of success, and of them comparing elements of your service – which they don’t even understand – with your competitors) – as I’ve commented before.

As for proposals? no more than a page, and reports no more than 2. Problem with payment? Pay me when YOU think the time is right, I know I will deliver.

Competition between agencies is fierce, can we all agree that – therefore the biggest factor in keeping your client is making them feel as though they can rely on you and that you care about their business.