Brandy
Is there no way that we can help a small business that doesn't have more than 300 a month?

Небылица
Depends on types of services you are providing for that price. If you just write requirements for blog posts for clients' website and place free links in comments and on forums, you can charge $300-$500 for this work.
On the other hand, if you was said push website to the first page from the third for competitive keyword, you should buy links which may cost more than $150 each or do outreach which will take a loooot of your time and that will cost more than $1000/month

Jesse
My agency charges based off of an hourly rate and what work is involved. The monthly ranges from $3500 to $6000 all dependent on how aggressive of a campaign the client wants. I’m sure there is a place for the $500 dollar people but again, you get what you put into it.
Jill
Personally, if it is a project that I am confident that I can help them with — I will take a client for smaller price ranges – but I am 100% clear that they may not see any ROI for 12 months or more at the 300-500 mark they are getting may 4-6 hours a month of time – which I do explain to them. But I have had clients in this range get results in just a few months because their sites were so bad. I do not take these small projects often… but when I do the results are good! 🙂

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Vermeer
All those people saying you can't do proper SEO on a 500/m budget are full of shit.
Either you are an elitist SEO (if so, the f*ck are you doing with these pocket change budgets?) or you are overcharging (Probably because you are outsourcing 99% of your business?) way too much.
300/500 per month is quite a nice price for a small company in non-mega competitive niches to spend a few hours a month on. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so much more than just doing some links and on-page… Just my honest 2 cents.
Ps. If you really think you are a good SEO: Get some decent results on these brick and mortar stores with very limited budget. You know, the money you make for that client to send his kid to school.
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Fleming
I'd say yeah you could help them in regards to addressing all their on-site technical SEO needs, I've seen site score major gain just addressing those issues alone. But being realistic your not going to be able to create or hire someone to create great content for them at that price either. So I'd guess you have to evaluate the work to gains that you would be able to achieve. As others have said you could also charge that for advising them on certain issues if they have the staff in house to do things such as content etc.

Igor
This conversation shows that most SEO vendors are bad at business. You cant just make blanket statements like this in regards to pricing. Your project fees should be based on campaign complexity (amount of monthly work required to achieve results) and your hourly fee. Every project has different needs. Anything else is just bad business.

Steven
For those who have been in this business for awhile and has economies of scale, I'd say #2 for sure.
I start at $200 for managed unique long-tail service all the way to $10,000+ per month. Keep in mind that $200 is a great way to get your foot in the door and upsell. I am selling and upselling like hotcakes now.
The secret sauce is being able to productize and systematize your services.
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Javer
Those low cost services are great because they attract the junk clients and reduce the amount of tire kickers which us premium agencies have to deal with

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Aston
My entry fee is £500 per month. I started in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in 1998 and then it was easy. Meta tags worked, competition was small and within 24 hours you saw results. Now it’s difficult and very time consuming. My focus now is managing expectations. For some industries my initial fee is a lot higher ( ie Hotels). I used to do free website audits but now charge for these as what was happening was my reports were used as leverage with other agencies!

Kumar
many factors to consider, i usually do it in fragmentation of services to sooth the clients requirements in better fit way. Like overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO), just on page SEO, only off page SEO or only blogging. For overall SEO of a site with traffic of 1000 pages views per week or above deserves a bid of USD1000 as standard. Usually I propose them rates in this manner, it helps in better, transparent and friendly negotiations!

Rupp
300-500 a month for SEO is plain ridiculous. Stupid actually. There's no way to take GOOD care of the number of clients you'd have to have to make good money. What's your actual profit per client? 100 bucks? So you need 50 plus clients. Plus no good client will respect you or treat you like a professional charging such a ridiculous rate.

Fleming
To point one thing out, the country you reside in also plays a major role in your charging. $300 in the UK is about £218 however the equivalent in Pakistan is around 3300 rupees and can lead to more services being able to be offered and achieved, Also for instance £300 in the UK is usually the lower end of a weeks wage for many people so it all depends on the exchange rate how much you need to live on or survive on and what hours you are willing to work.
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Rick
Lets compare it to another industry that is looked at as many look at the SEO industry, Lawyers & Attorneys. How confident would you feel hiring a $300 attorney to represent you VS a $2000 attorney? They like us, are in to make money and are able to command higher prices because of their track record of producing results for clients. If you can't show significant results at those lower rates, you will out of business before long. I for one, do not want to offer Walmart pricing for my services. I do good work and like Attorneys, expect to be compensated well for my time and effort.

Steven
I think one of the issues with this type of question is that people tend to apply it to their existing business model and attempt to compare. It's like comparing apples to a Mexican migrant worker. They only look at the pricing part and judge.
If your core offer is $500 without any upsell opportunities and costs $400 in hard costs, that would make a poor business model. I would not even go there.
Here are some cases where you can apply the low-cost offer and make it work… I mean thrive.
1) $500 offer needs to be recurring and should not cost you more than $100 in hard costs unless you engineer the offer as a loss leader. It also cannot be a time-suck.
2) You can replicate the process and capture the market on a national scale. i.e. plumbers across the U.S.
3) You can McDonaldlize and scale.
4) Have an opportunity to work with an organization or a franchise.
5) Be able to upsell and position the offer as a tripwire offer, not core offer and client gets it.

Alex
You can do a lot for that under $500 price per month. Everyone always wants to go after bigger ticket clients but they make up a small percentage of the market.
Think about it, 1,000 $500/mo clients will take you about the same amount of work as a few normal clients assuming you set up proper boundaries and expectations.
Most small businesses don't need much to rank locally and doing what we consider "small things" can have huge results for small businesses. Leveraging things like Fiverr and Software you can pretty much automate the entire process and then it's just a matter of scale.
Everyone is too focused on the number and not on the value they provide imo.
Rick
Everyone is correct, and each has their bottom line that they are willing to work for, to each his own, lets leave it at that.
Saini
everyone has its quality of services and he charges for his quality.
Telian
One cant buy something good with a cheap price- not possible.

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