Do you guys put your pricing on your website?

[mikepcservice]

If not, can you tell me why please? My thinking is on one hand it might be best practice to do it so people won't have to call for pricing to waste your time. On the hand if they don't call then no chance to negotiate with a potential customer, how do you guys handle this please?

 

[djbaxter]

Depends on the industry.

For products, it's usually more straightforward but even then many items can change price over time and probably a lot quicker than Google will update what's in the index.

For services, I would generally say no because the price is going to depend on the extent and complexity of the job.

 

[Conor Treacy]

If not, can you tell me why please? My thinking is on one hand it might be best practice to do it so people won't have to call for pricing to waste your time. On the hand if they don't call then no chance to negotiate with a potential customer, how do you guys handle this please?

Most of the businesses we operate with have a "Starting At" type pricing listed. Of course, product type websites have the actual pricing, and restaurants, if they choose to up a menu up, sometimes those have pricing.

If you're talking about a Web Design or SEO business, we put ballpark starting prices. If we know we'll never do something for less than "X" then we put that as a starting price, but since every project is unique we don't put a fixed price on the site.

As you said, putting the pricing can mean no chance to negotiate, but for our business, we don't negotiate. I'd rather the phone doesn't ring and spending 30 minutes talking to someone about their project to find out that they don't have a budget.

 

[mikepcservice]

You're sure right about that. I am tired of giving out valuable info to people sometimes on the phone sometimes for up to an hour then to find out they can only pay 2 or 3 hundred for SEO.

 

[mikepcservice]

I have seen some SEO folks charging by the amount of kw's to push so like $400 for 4 kw's e.t.c, do you consider this when coming up with your pricing please?

 

[Conor Treacy]

I have seen some SEO folks charging by the amount of kw's to push so like $400 for 4 kw's e.t.c, do you consider this when coming up with your pricing please?

We don't charge by the keyword, but this was very much a standard many years ago.

For us, we have an hourly rate and we would target more "topics" than "keywords" as such. Then our hourly rate is based on the work performed as an overall for the campaign.

As an example of keyword versus topic, take the term "carpet cleaner" for a service business. While it would be nice to put all our effort into just that word, there is a bigger chance of more traffic by going after similar topic phrases. So we would group in phrases like the following:

• carpet cleaning company
• carpet cleaning companies
• professional carpet cleaning
• residential carpet cleaning company
• commercial carpet cleaning
• local carpet cleaning
• etc

If we were to bill by the keyword, that would be 6 keywords, but they're not necessarily even the traffic drivers to the site. At the end of the day, the goal is to not just drive traffic, but to get the phone ringing at the company too. Maybe they're one of the few companies that have "waterless carpet cleaning" or "steam cleaning", those are different angles too.

So for us at least, we don't target after a group of keywords, but rather an entire selection. Going after "residential" will automatically increase "house" and "home" type phrases etc too. So we target to move the entire group in rankings and time is then tracked for on-page edits, off-site edits, article writing/rewriting, etc

 

[mikepcservice]

Also guys, can you tell me if you all have a "starting" price for web design and if yes, what that is please?