I often face questions from clients regarding services they may feel are priced very high. Those who question high priced SEO services have in almost all cases spoken to one of two kinds of people, which I will describe below:

1. The "SEO is piece of cake" guy. There will always be those who brag about how easy SEO is just because they managed to rank in some niche with nearly no competition at all. This guy is most likely a friend and have never worked with a SEO company. At most he is a freelance consultant struggling to put food on the table. He’s been working with putting up websites for some years and gets his Internet income from various affiliate programs and, of course, Adsense. He managed to rank a niche website with low competition with no budget, just by building average content using title, h1 and meta-tags.
2. The "low-cost with 100% guaranteed results" guy. I think this must be my favourite. They’re also the experts on cold calls/emails. They offer low cost services with excellent results. Even better, they offer guarantees. These guys have various methods of achieving this. Sometimes it includes ranking you in a search engine you’ve never heard of, other times they can offer you links on blogs set up a few weeks ago, with no inbound links except for their own sites (and thanks to Linkscape, avoiding these just got so much easier).

So after speaking with clients who have previously met with one of these two guys, I always get asked this question: "Why do your SEO services cost so much, especially when you can’t guarantee the same results?" I kind of hate getting this question because it makes me feel like a sleazy sales guy trying to trash my competitors.

I go on with the normal routine, explaining how no one can guarantee results in Google. I’ve so far made myself understood every time (at least it looks so). Then I explain that if their site is in a niche with lots of strong competitors, it will require a bit more than just the title tags and H1. The normal stuff -- I’m sure you all know this so I’m not going to bother. However, there is a story that seems to do the trick that you might not have heard before. It’s a famous story and I’ve heard at least a dozen different variants of it. The trick is to relate it:

A man worked at a manufacturing plant as a technician. He was good at his job. One day the plant was sold and the new owner noticed that the machines seemed to run quite fine by themselves and figured that it was a waste of money to pay a full time salary to the technician. The technician was then fired.

A while later one of the most important machines of the manufacturing plant breaks down, leaving all the employees with nothing to do. The plant is losing money every minute and no one can fix it, since the company that produced the machine is out of business. The new owner hesitates, but calls the old technician. The technician shows up, has a quick look at the machine, finds his hammer and gives it a few whacks. The machine starts running smoothly again. He then proceeds to present the owner with the fine:

Invoice:Repair of machinery: $10,000

The owner finds the invoice outrageous and complains to the technician. The technician takes back the invoice and rewrites it:

Invoice: Whacking machinery with hammer: $100. Knowing where and how hard to whack: $9,900.

The owner then paid the bill.

So what is the lesson of the story? It’s simple. Knowing what to do to rank your site is easy. You just got to build a site with good content and structure and trustworthy links. That’s the what, and finding a guide explaining this is simple. They’re all over the Internet. How is the big question, and it’s the how that separates good and bad SEO companies, both in results and price. The customers don’t only pay for the product. They pay for your knowledge as well.

Remember that in most cases you get what you pay for. So people, remember to charge a price you could live with. How much is your knowledge worth?