Every company has got its own pricing policies and especially when it comes to SEO many times the SEO companies and the clients who want to avail of these services are not sure of deciding upon the way the whole SEO campaign should be priced.
Any pricing for any service should be fair to the service provider as well to the client.
Normally, many SEO companies charge on per month basis and I have seen the demand for this mode of payment internationally also.
But, according to me, charging the client on a per month basis for an SEO campaign is not correct at all. As, when we consider an SEO project we know that
• The results will take time to be reflected on the search engines.
• It has to be a yearly project .( If proper results and search engine presence is needed).
• The rankings for some long tail keywords or which are location specific may start showing results in 2-3 months but for the specific keywords for which the site is being optimized might take at least 10-12 months.
• The SEO efforts (On-Page and Off-Page) put shall start from the very first day after the initial analysis of the site.
• No SEO can say that the Meta tags shall be put on the first month and then in the second month the sitemap.xml file shall be submitted. What I mean to say every SEO project needs to be given an overall tuning and that starts from day one.
In short it is just not possible to break up the work on a monthly basis and charge on a monthly basis if you are looking at a complete SEO campaign and search engine presence. Such a mode of payment does not do any justice to both the parties.
The best way is to split the payment into two installments of 50% each. i.e you charge 50% when the SEO contract is signed and the balance when the rankings start appearing in the search engines i.e usually after 3-4 months. The installments can be split into 2 or 3 depending on the mutual convenience of both the parties.
If the budget is a constraint for the client but search engine presence is what the client wants to start off with then the company can have packages suited to give a start by local search, only basic on-page optimization services which can be comparatively low priced but with definite results and later on there can be an option of upgrading these packages to the yearly plan by the client.
This kind of pricing is fair to both the parties i.e the SEO services provider and the client. Moreover, the SEO project gets a complete holistic approach by both the parties. The client also is mentally prepared that the SEO results are not going to be achieved in a jiffy, it will take time and this makes him develop the patience for it.
