An Urgent Question for Experienced SEO Managers

byGordon3

301 followers

7 years ago

I have a question that is fairly involved but basically comes down to how I should charge a client for SEO work.

Basically it’s been a frustrating thing when I got a part time job doing SEO for a drug and Alcohol Rehab website. So Far I’ve made back my membership for this year at least 4 times over (I said somewhere it was three times over but I forgot I had done the Black Friday deal or something).

So it started rough as I the owner challenged my knowledge right away peppering me with questions about things I knew nothing about. Technical things about if I could manage the hundreds of websites he had and all the separate hosts he had. He gloated a lot and I got the feeling he decided I didn’t know what I was talking about. At least that was the ego trip he was playing.

It took a couple of conversations before I started to realize he had been doing Blackhat SEO. Immediately I got the feeling something sleazy was going on when I noticed he didn’t have GMB Google My Business and having just finished Jay’s training on it I offered to fix it and asked him why he didn’t have it. He said Google had taken it away because they had, in an attempt to keep client confidentiality, used the wrong address for the rehab.

I PM’ed Jay himself with this and he thought the reason for the penalty was probably due to the blacklinking when he ran an SEM rush on the site.

As time went on the owner told me more about the penalties, which i kept bringing up. I kept saying he had to start going White hat and each time he protested. “Nah” he would say, “They won’t derank everything.” They already deindexed a bunch (over 1000 articles with 200 remaining) already and he felt they had done their worst and could/would not do any more. He asked me if I knew anything about Google Adwords” He would not say how much he was paying and would not give me access to console and analytics. When I said I didn’t know much about it even if I could do anything with it and since final clients phoned it would be hard to track. He waffled and pretended like he was struggling to keep me for some reason as (As if I had not done enough so far.) The rehab at the time was almost empty and according to other staff had always been full in the past.

What I had done was start up one of the many plugins he had but was not using (Yoast) and started trying to make all the articles green (SEO optimized according to Yoast). I said we would have to start going organic slowly and in many instances, because he always disagreed with every suggestion I made, I went ahead and did it anyway….fixing a couple three articles a shift plus some writing. I started a slow process of filling in the articles by about 50 words each because they were all uniformly about 450 words. Whoever was writing before kept it at 450 words per article.

• None of the articles had/have meta descriptions or titles.

• The pictures had no alt descriptions.

• spelling and grammatical errors

• There were two different phone numbers on the main page and when I asked him for one I could remove he gave no response. In fact this is the response I got for most of my suggestions.

• There were no internal and rarely external links

• I could tell no keyword research had been done as he could rank for any keyword he wanted with massive backlinking I suspect. So changing the titles posed a conundrum for me.

I figured he had decided he would go with Adwords and get rid of me somehow as my hours got drastically cut back because another person who was supposed to be leaving didn’t. Anyway I started scrolling thorough indeed looking at SEO copywriting type jobs and what did I find?

I found a posting that asked for someone who could carry out almost every suggestion I had ever made to him and had been doing. Here it is:

I did keep my cool as I suspected he would not be able to find someone to do all this work for the amount he was wanting to pay. But I don’t know. That’s part of my question here. I mentioned I had seen the job posting he had made on Indeed when asking him for my check which was a whole other thing where he tried to keep me on “contract” rather than on payroll as I had assumed.

I said I considered this to be a good cause and because of that I would possibly donate some time to fixing some of that stuff, but that I might be working days so if he wanted I might be open to figuring out some kind of contract work for this stuff and that would guarantee I would do stuff.

As you can see he wants an Adwords manager, social media manager, content writer, Webmaster, Copywriter and SEO manager and someone to take care of GMB even though he has been penalized.

Now that I have another part time job where I might be able to work on computer stuff of my own at the same time, I was thinking of approaching him to do some kind of ‘piece work” for fixing articles. I figure I could do two or three articles a day.

My question is how much should I charge him for doing that just the bulleted items listed above...fixing based on Yoast recommendations... for each of the 200 or so remaining articles he has on the site.

I was thinking of recommending some firms who specialize in fixing Google penalties and after they had fixed it proposing that I could go in a fix the articles as those would be time consuming and possibly more expensive for them to do. I don’t know. They would probably be taking down all the other backlinked sites? That is an area of expertise we are not taught here at WA but, really why should we be taught that? We are being taught the right way to do things so we don’t run into this trouble in the first place. This has been a lesson that I wrote about in my blog.

After all the stress and grief, and I don’t think I’ve been treated respectfully, I was thinking $50 an article. That would end up being about $150 a day and $10,000 for all his presently (according to him indexed) articles.

If anyone has any idea what the market value of this type and amount of work please let me know. I live in Canada, so Canadian dollars apply.

Thanks in advance for any help.