What price should you pay for seo services

[ClaireH-184886]

A friend of mine has a business site and he has said to me that he has been receiving a number of emails with regards to seo services.

He is seriously thinking about using a company to help him as he does not have the time to promote his site and get it in the top of the search engines.

Last week he asked me what price should he be paying for a small business site and to be honest i could not give him an answer as i have never used a company who deal with seo before.

A lot of the emails he has received are from India, and i would like to know what is involved, do they need access inside your site and what price is a good price to pay.

Normally i would have told him to learn seo himself but due to the lack of time he has i can understand why he needs a company to help him

any help would be good

[SVmedia]

I'll echo the first 2 responses - don't hire a tele/email marketing "SEO company."  Google's webmaster guidelines should give you a good idea of what kind of questions you should be asking an SEO.  Check this out ... and ask the questions, if they're a real SEO they will appreciate that you care enough to ask.....

Be very wary of companies that only talk about "links/link-building,"  and not on-site optimization.  I have a few clients who before hiring me, were paying SEO companies $500-$1000 a month for "link building" - and the only thing they have to show for it is a bunch of automated comment and article spam. - (these links are useless/harmful)....

Good luck to you, you're in the right place to find a good upstanding SEO!

[ClaireH-184886]

Thank you for this, i will let him know to ignore the emails and to look out for seo companies. I personally block most of the spam and did say to him that a lot of people out there promise the world.

[irvingw]

Don't hire a SEO from spam emails is my first suggestion. I would ask around these forums and look for someone who has a lot of moz points and is respected in the community.

Cost is hard to say, it depends on the size of the site, the platform and the amount of technical issues that need to be fixed. He could hire someone for an SEO recommendations document and then implement the changes himself, that's the cheapest way to go.

[UnderRugSwept]

The latest Whiteboard Friday should answer all of your questions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-i-find-a-good-seo

I will leave you with one piece of advice. My number one rule for finding an SEO company is this: You find the good guys; the bad guys find you. In other words, do NOT respond to those solicitations from India. Go out and do some research.

Here's a really good post to check out as well: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-seo-consultants-actually-know-what-theyre-talking-about