This is a question often asked by people new to the game.

Many project retainers ranged between $500 and $7,500, according to Moz’s 2012 pricing survey of more than 600 SEO firms.

The reality Is the scope of work can vary from the simple local client needs of a website and keywords to a full-blown marketing and PPC program for a major client that is looking to gain exposure and metrics across the nation.

The explanation below is based more on Melbourne, Florida local digital marketing projects such as web design in word press SEO keywords and researching brand awareness.

Let’s review the list below to give you a head start of the types of questions asked when reaching out to a digital marketing agency and looking for some guidance or to possibly hire them.

The list of clients ranges from SMB’s to larger scale projects. Most clients have hired me to work on local SEO and typically own business ranging from 1-10 employees. Typical categories are homeowner services, software start-ups, hospitality, medical, dental, e-commerce, and retail.

Make sure the candidate’s proposal includes an initial technical review of your website to weed out any problems that could lower your search engine ranking, including broken links and error pages. Consultants also should provide “on page” optimization, a process to make your website as search engine friendly as possible.

• Discuss your overall business goals and challenges this gives the SEO consultant a grasp of what you have tried and goals you expect.

• Ask for referrals of past clients or reviews of previous work. Although this does not necessary reflect on skills if they have been working for bigger company portfolios.

• Discuss if they adhere to search engines’ webmaster guidelines. White hat SEO is the term for agencies not trying to spam the client’s website to rank.

• Ask “Can you guarantee my ranking?” and if they answer yes. Do not engage anymore since it’s impossible to guarantee a number-one ranking on any search engine.

• Discuss if they have experience creating a website that is optimized for what’s known as “local SEO,” it should appear when someone nearby is searching for keywords that are relevant to your business.

• Make sure the candidate’s proposal includes an initial technical review of your website to weed out any problems that could lower your search engine ranking, including broken links and error pages.

• Confirm details of communication such as via phone, Skype, texting or email. And find out how often will he or she reach out to you with status updates.

• Ask about fee’s and payment terms. Consulting and projects in the SEO industry can vary widely, depending on a project’s size and complexity.

Clients expectations on how quickly ranking will be achieved depends on their experience of either practicing PPC or SEO themselves or hiring a company that didn’t offer much ROI in return.

Organic ranking is one of many digital strategies to implement depending on a client’s goals.

In this scenario, customers must think about the returns by getting organic traffic through SEO.

They should think about keywords research and what their target market is along with branding concepts. 

Example: “I want to rank for “garage repair Seminole county” and while this is a great keyword, it corners the search to a particular county. We would suggest “garage repair Orlando” which encompass an entire city.

You can ask for an estimate on how much time it takes to rank for a certain topic, but the time duration depends upon the competition of the keyword or market.

Example: Business wants to rank for “professional antique clock restoration” for their niche ‘and this keyword rank is about 15 searches a month.

Versus an attorney looking to rank “New York DUI attorney” that is highly competitive and gets about 18,000 searches per month.

Try to read up and research SEO history and tactics with some sites such as Brian Dean of Backlinko to better understand the industry and how much time is involved to gain customers in the Wild West of digital marketing in 2019.