Truslow
Here are some numbers for the "sexism" stuff mentioned above:
I'm in a fairly unique situation, I think. I white label myself to several different agencies. The two that provide me the most work (about 70-80% of it) also have the same core "workhorse" team. Except for myself, that core team is all female as are the agency owners who book the jobs and oversee everything. As such, I can say that the all-but-me female team has no problem charging top dollar for our services.
In only two cases over the past 8 years I've worked for these agencies, only 2 clients have given us issues in terms of what would be deemed sexism. The business owners were generally (and both unabashedly) sexist. If one of the women on the team brought up an idea – it would invariably be questioned and picked apart. If it was me who outlined the idea and presented it, it was greenlit immediately. In those two cases, I simply took on the role of "speaker" (even though the actual jobs and organization behind the scene didn't change) and we managed it that way.
At no other times have I really felt an issue with pricing, nor companies wanting to negotiate. And, in our case, it's certainly not sexism – the Grrl Power team I work with lands great paying gigs and all I need to do is the tech SEO work and consult on strategies.
I think the difference though is in how success is measured. Many SEO folks define success by "top rankings" or "more traffic." These are pretty useless goals because it's impossible to describe or even see a value there. We start by talking about how many leads/sales a client gets now. If it's leads they are after, we ask their current conversion rates (how many contacts per month – and how many of those convert).
In our objectives, we then set reasonable targets to increase the number of leads they get per month. And in many cases, we'll offer up options that include CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) to make it so each lead is more valuable.
Now, just knowing the average sale, you can say how many leads and/or what percentage of conversion rate improvement is needed to make us pay for ourselves.
Typically it works out like this: In the first few months, we'll cost a lot. By month 3-4, we're not costing anything, but still eating to big a chunk of their margins. By month 6-7, now we're at a point where their SEO/Digital Marketing/CRO stuff is in line at about 10-15% of their revenues. (More competition can mean longer path to reach those numbers, but generally those work).
Those are goals and objectives that the client can see value in – so there's no questioning the cost. That's what it's going to take to get to that goal in that timeframe. Want to pay less and it's going to take longer to start breaking even or it's going to have a final resting place that's higher than that target 10-15%.
We typically provide a tiered option set too. Here is the bare minimum it's going to take to reach our target goals. If you want to spend a bit more, we can reach them a bit quicker and/or work on other things that can increase margins. (For example, I often put together warehouse logistic plans that tie into the web site so that pick and ship procedures are more streamlined – or we set up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for them that cuts back on labor time and so on.
All of those things have a "value" that someone not familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing can see. So long as we stay close to being on track with our goals – then there's never a problem. If we fall behind, they fire us.
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More than 70% of SEO users in the U.S. are men, make more than female colleagues

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