Should We Request Payment Upfront For SEO Services
-
Hi,
I would like to hear how people work their billing for SEO work. I have previously been charging month in arrears to my clients but now have had a couple of companies run into financial difficulties and not be able to pay there bills.
I would like to know how many of you choose to charge clients up front for work or send them a bill after a month etc.
Thanks
-
Always take a deposit and also get them to sign a contract outlining what your going to provide and what you expect from them. It then stops any issues over service levels and also it makes sure you get paid.
I always get 50% upfront for once of projects and then first payment upfront for any monthly work.
Contracts are the key and also your terms and conditions are key.
-
Hey Richard, for us it all depends on the kind of work. For audits we generally charge up front for smaller jobs and 50% up front and 50% on delivery for medium to large jobs.
If it is a monthly arrangement, then that is generally a monthly billing cycle but I would always make sure the client is serious about the project and has enough going on to ensure they can pay and if payment stops, so does the work.
For content creation we will often do a 50% up front and 50% on delivery as well.
No hard and fast rules really - you just have to figure out what is fair and what works for you and your clients.
Hope that helps
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Know what state my product is requested ?
Hello, Is there a way to know in what state my product is the most "typed" / requested in ? Thank you,
Search Behavior | | seoanalytics0 -
Re-Launching Old website with New SEO Friendly Features - What should I track?
Hey Mozers, I was brought on to the team to Optimize the old website to make it more SEO friendly and I was able to get some cool features up. What Analytic Key points should I keep track of? The website launches in 2 weeks and I think Now would be a great time to start gather data bout the old site. I'd like to make sure I keep the website under a microscope to make sure there are as little errors as possible. What am I missing I already have: Page Authority Domain Authority Bounce Rate Time on page Visitors/Sessions Unique Visitors/Sessions
Search Behavior | | rpaiva0 -
SEO For A Title Company?
Has anyone ever had success with doing SEO for a title company? The owner of our law firm has one, and I'd be happy to work on it, but it just doesn't seem to be cost-effective. From my experience, title business goes to people who personally know the realtor; no one who actually has a say is "googling title companies." But, if I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it and any experiences you want to share. Thanks, Ruben
Search Behavior | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How to approach SEO for a large site that doesn't have specific keyword goals?
So, I have a project that has 10,000+ page of unique editorial content in a specific industry. They currently get about 500,000 pageviews a month and average just under 2 pages per visit. It has a 66 domain authority and has been doing "the basics" for SEO for about 7 years (headline is an H1, URL is custom while the headline is more "reader friendly", description is a snippet of the body copy a little into the first paragraph, nofollow in the comments). The crux is that it's an editorial publication so they're not targeting specific keywords, but a wide swath of keywords. Would it be best to just dive in and figure out some of the less competitive keywords for some of the articles that they could tailor some content to rank better for, then just move onto more and more? What are some ways to approach this if they just want to raise their general traffic and relevancy to the next level?
Search Behavior | | jpea0 -
What is SEO to you
We define SEO, as search engine optimization. Though it is more of an art. A web developer is not necessarily a SEO and vice versa. In my job as a web developer I wear many hats, and often asked what exactly SEO is. Before panda the seo industry seemed to follow "tricks" to get sites ranked. This practice lead to many seo company's thinking that spamming links, using link exchanges, link rings etc.. was actually the way to "SEO". So now it seams SEO is simply a short word as to how to get your site in top results, thusly ignoring the actual definition. As a web developer I always viewed SEO as a way to help the search engines understand what my web page is about. What do you think SEO means to you and your company?
Search Behavior | | donford0 -
How to optimize website for several US locations we service?
Hi, Our business has a few brick-and-mortar business locations, but it is servicing multiple big cities in the US, where we do not have a location, but we do business in though our independent agents (and we cannot use their locations).
Search Behavior | | SCLTeamShip
I have inherited the website, which has duplicate content for all the locations (cities and states), and I am worried about possible penalties. Every major city and state in the US has been targeted so far, but it seems pretty spammy to me- duplicate content, pages for all major US cities, pages for all states, etc. This is a B2C services website, and we can service anyone in the US. Example of pages: domain.com/services/service-from-x-city
and domain.com/services/service-from-x-state The goal is to rank locally for all the cities we are targeting. What on-page optimization should I work on besides unique content for each one? Should I consolidate some pages, and if yes, what do you recommend?
What overall strategies should I follow so I do not lose the traffic for the targeted cities?
Off-page, I am working on building local citations for these cities. Thank you.0 -
Does Page Load Time Affect SEO Rankings?
I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did: I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes Bounce Rate decreased by 20% Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test) In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached My question is three-fold: Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings? Would the page load time decrease rankings? Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?
Search Behavior | | HMCOE0 -
How can we provide geo-detection without hurting SEO?
We represent a franchise, and the parent site does well for head terms, but we want to add a feature with the nearest location to a consumer based on geo-detection. We don't want to hurt the rankings for broad head terms. Could we use an iFrame to present the closest shop without affecting the general SEO we have done?
Search Behavior | | lunavista-comm0