SEO Rates Drop in May

It’s one of those often unspoken realities: SEO rates often vary in conjunction with demand.  At Sozo Firm, we’ve had some months where the demand was so high, we were providing sky high quotes knowing that we were essentially maxed out.  As we are beginning to enter the summer months now, things have slowed down, and we have a number of large proposals “hanging out there” while I scurry to keep the team productive and occupied in the meantime.

Downtimes are valuable.  They can be excellent times to sit back and exercise your brain, as if we don’t do that enough in the fast paced world of SEO & internet marketing.  Downtimes also provide excellent moments to get caught up on our own projects we’ve set aside during the insanely hectic times.  But, oddly enough, it seems like the very moment we begin working on some of our own websites, the phones start ringing off the hook and the request for proposals begin to swamp us and those forgotten projects of the past resume their dusty places on the shelf.

All of this late night jibber jabbering to state that we have just released our SEO rates for the month of May 2008, and we’ve slashed a number of our rates.  Most visibly affected were our internet marketing consultant packages followed by our corporate SEO packages.  Our hourly rate went from $150/hr (with lesser tiers) to $120/hr with several lesser tiers based on the total number of hours “purchased” within the contract.

My intention in making these temporary rate changes is not to attempt to compete with the “cheap” SEO companies which swamp the web (we have no desire to turn into a “search engine submission company”), but to merely exercise an experiment in supply & demand.  In doing so, I’ll readily acknowledge that even search engine optimization companies are flexible when the economy bends. 

But I won’t get all bent over and depressed about the economy.  As I never stop saying, it’s when the economy is out of shape that the little guys have their best chance to fight the giants.