SEO Packages

SEO Pricing

Web Design WorkPlace makes every SEO contract individually, but the work is generally priced at $100 per hour with a minimum hourly commitment of 10 hours a month and a minimum calendar commitment of 3 months. In addition to the fee for labor, there is a fee to list your site in popular directories. Depending on your business and the directories available, this fee will be calculated and put right in the contract up front before the work is started.

More on Directories and Why You Need Them

Directory listings provide legitimate inbound links to build popularity and they are one of the key factors to building “PageRank”. For example, Yahoo Dir! is a well known and trusted directory and they charge $300 for a business listing that includes a link to your website. The more quality inbound links each page on your website gets usually correlates to higher rankings for keywords on those pages. A lot of SEO firms will use a technique known as “buying links” and we don’t recommend that because the technique violates search engine guidelines for webmasters. The same SEO firms that buy links also use another grey area technique known as “link farming” where they artificially create an appearance of popularity using inbound links from known bad communities. Web Design WorkPlace keeps every aspect of our link building portion of your SEO Campaign in the area of generally accepted “best practices” or “White Hat SEO”. The SEO firms that literally guarantee a # 1 ranking on Google are almost invariably in the area we would call “Black Hat SEO”. Their operations can lead to your website getting poor rankings or even get you banned if they get caught. The goal with our directory listing program is to get your site inbound links from relevant authorities in your field using only professional standard sources.

Depending on the genre and keyword list we may need to make a number of directory placements. A small campaign would generally require $1,000 to $1,500 for directory placements and a larger campaign would require around $5,000 just for the listing fees. As part of the directory fee and depending on your genre we may elect to do some PR Newswire or other related “best practice” techniques to build inbound links naturally over time. Search engines want to see an organic increase in the number of inbound links and our directory fee covers that aspect of your SEO Campaign.

A typical SEO Campaign might last 3 months and cost your a total of $4,000 which would be $3,000 for labor and $1,000 for directory placements. But each contract is custom tailored to your business and what you want to achieve through SEO and Internet Marketing.

Keywords

The selection of “keyword phrases” you want to rank highly for is a critical component of your SEO Campaign. We generally recommend targeting 5 to 10 keywords for most SEO campaigns, but we don’t have a set limit. The more keywords and the more difficult the keywords, the more work it requires to be competitive for them. The keyword phrases that get the most clicks are generally the most competitive and the most difficult to rank highly for. Subsequently they take the most amount of work and the longest amount of time to achieve. Less competitive phrases are what we call “low hanging fruit” and they require less work and less time to get. So when we start an SEO Campaign, we concentrate effort on the hardest to get phrases first but we actually get high rankings with the low hanging fruit much more quickly. By the time we get on Google Page One or in the Top 10 rankings for a competitive keyword phrase, we’ve normally already put a number of the lower hanging fruits in your basket with high rankings that are fairly steady over time.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process where web pages are enhanced using on page factors and off page factors to get more qualified visitors to the page and engaged once they get there. SEO is a relatively new science that sometimes looks more like an art form. We know clearly what “best practice guidelines” do for a website in terms of search, and that part is pure science. But Search Engines never reveal their secret algorithms, so aside from the factors that the SEO community is sure of, we also have to make judgement calls and even educated guesses sometimes. That’s the area where our work takes on the appearance of art. The requirements to impress Search Engines are constantly changing, but the process remains the same. We first create a good design structure that search engines will find easy to crawl, then we build relevance to specific search phrases, and over time we grow the authority and trust to a page without appearing to manipulate the natural progression.

How do you measure SEO success?

The real purpose for spending the time and money to optimize your website for SEO is to get more leads and more sales and to do that as efficiently and economically as possible. That being said, there are three traditional measurements of SEO success. Note that these are all good indicators of SEO health, but these numerical references in themselves are not the end goal. These are:

Google Ranking. In that regard we have had many hundreds of “Top 10″ and “Page One” and “top 30″ and # 1 or # 2 or # 3 rankings on Google and Yahoo and MSN.
Unique Qualified Visitors. That is how many hundreds or thousands of visitors that went to your site looking specifically for a term that could lead to a sale.
Google PageRank or PR. This is a numeric value assigned by Google to tell us how much they consider the website to be a trusted authority.

We spend your money on internet advertising.

When we contract for SEO, we have to spend a portion of the money we receive for well established directory placements. We use directories that are recommended by Google for starters. Natural SEO takes time, it’s not like “instant SEO” or PPC (Pay Per Click internet advertising). PPC advertising spends generally large sums to quickly get clicks and hopefully sales. Natural SEO takes many months and years in fact to build PageRank and Google Rankings and increase visitor traffic. It also requires monthly work to show Search Engines that there is a fully engaged webmaster tending to a website and there are improvements constantly being made. So called Natural SEO or Organic SEO is usually more cost effective in the long run and it can have much greater yields in terms on ROI or return on investment. $5,000 invested into Natural SEO can have years worth of positive returns when that entire amount can be spent in a few weeks for PPC with zero long term positive impact.

Included in every SEO package

Keywords are the phrases we are going to optimize your website for and ultimately try to rank well for. The keyword phrases are negotiated at the beginning of an SEO Contract. We usually like to keep the list to 5 to 10 phrases but we custom build a unique keyword list specific to your business and goals. We don’t begin work until you are 100% satisfied with the keyword list. Unlike contracting with large advertising agency SEO factories where keywords lists can never be changed once a campaign starts, we can change keyword targets at your desire at any time during our campaign.
All SEO clients receive monthly reports. These consist of three parts: a Web Positions Pro Ranking Report, the Server Logs indicating unique visitors and search engine referrals, and an executive summary.

Our SEO Guarantee

We guarantee that we will work the hours we are contracted for and that we will try to the best of our ability to get your site the best rankings, the most qualified traffic, the highest PageRank, and the most leads. In many cases that leads to page one rankings especially for terms that are a combination of a GEO – a geographic area and an AOP – or what we call an area of practice. When a company guarantees a # 1 ranking on Google, that’s an outrageous claim and Google goes to great lengths to ensure that they do not get tricked like that… at least for very long. We build rankings that are rock solid in terms of the Google Webmaster Guidelines – “White Hat” all the way. And we have scored literally hundreds of top 10 and indeed #1, # 2, and #3 rankings along the way. But we would do better to inform you that it is not reasonable or prudent to guarantee that tomorrow you will be # 1. SEO firms do not own Google, but some used car salesmen moonlighting as SEO pundits might want you to think they do.