We’re excited to now offer standard packages for small businesses wanting help with SEO and SEM. Writing SEO/SEM proposals for startups, non-profits, and other small businesses has been my least favorite task since we started Marketade. It takes time away from more productive work, and it always felt like a guess in terms of the hours and cost we quoted.
No matter how many projects we do, we don’t seem to be able to accurately predict how long a new one will take — because SEO and SEM projects are inherently unpredictable. Especially because these have been projects for budget-strapped businesses, we tended to err on the low side in our quotes, which meant we often ended up working many more hours than we got paid for.
Our new packages attempt to solve all these problems by providing a structure that’s both clear and flexible — and gets us out of the custom proposal writing business for small search projects. We …
- offer a discounted hourly rate of $150
- use a not-to-exceed structure where clients pay only for hours we work
- don’t provide custom quotes, instead leaving it up to clients to set a max budget
- provide minimum, maximum, and average hours/costs to give clients an idea of what to expect
We realize clients would prefer to know, ahead of time, exactly how much an SEO/SEM project will cost. But given that we can’t predict how long these projects will take, we feel strongly that the approach we’ve come up with is the best one.