Delivering an accurate, reasonable price for your search marketing services is not an easy task. It requires that you pay attention to numerous factors that can affect the effort and time required to complete, along with internal and external market forces.

Here are the items GIM includes for a basic, consulting-style contract:

The deliverable would include 10 hours of GIM consultation time each month for 4.5 months and a single report, delivered 45 days after contract signing, containing the following elements:

• Keyword Research & Recommendations (what keywords will pull in qualified traffic, how many searches do these terms/phrases get, how should keywords be used in the site to attract search traffic)
• Review of Search Engine Friendliness Issues (URLs, KW Usage, Code, Internal Linking, Metadata, Sitemap Use, etc.)
• Competitive Analysis (who's currently chasing traffic for their terms or targeting the audience they want, what are these sites doing right or wrong)
• Design, Usability & User Experience Suggestions (to help improve the way visitors perceive/use the site)
• Content Creation Suggestions (what kinds of content would be valuable to add to the site to attract additional traffic and convert existing users)
• Link Acquisition Suggestions (a list of some great places to start requesting/buying/building links and ongoing strategies for a link campaign)
• Recommendations for Avoiding Negative Search Engine Issues (duplicate content, URL canonicalization, re-direction of content - I note that they have multiple domains, etc.)

Although the bulk of the work is done upfront (in both of the above scenarios), we like to help spread the cost over the entire contract, as it makes it more affordable and practical for our clients.