Attorneys are notorious for the high billable hourly rate charged to clients. A number of factors come into play to determine the exact rate, from the size of the firm, to experience, reputation and demand for the lawyer in question. At the elite range, you could easily be paying 4 figures but even at the mid-range, you’ll be forking out anywhere between $250 to $400 per hour.
What about search marketing, how do you value an hour with your Search Marketing Consultant? When a particular tactic is being executed upon, such as rewriting the ad copy throughout the account in order to test a new approach, do you measure value by simply looking at the end result or do you take into account the expertise and number of hours that have gone into the work?
Measuring Value
It is virtually impossible to compare search marketing solutions between vendors largely because as Rand Fiskin put it in a post 3 years ago:
‘Knowledge of how the industry operates and how to judge vendors is knowledge that’s nearly as hard to come by as the search marketing techniques themselves’
It’s nearly impossible to measure two vendors side by side. Even two vendors who appear to offer a very similar service may provide a rather different experience in execution, value and cost. Though difficult to accurately compare search marketing solutions, you can draw upon the experiences you have had with vendors.
How do you value the work that a vendor does for your business? Do you measure output or the time dedicated to your account? If you are looking at the end task result only and not taking into account the man-hours that have gone into the work, you may be undervaluing the solution.
Valuing search marketing services is just one of many challenges that still face this, relatively speaking, fledgling industry. Compared to the legal system, which has hundreds of years on search marketing, we are still far away from developing standards that could assist in setting a minimum bar. If we had standards in this industry, tangible, measurable standards, you could then more easily valuate what is worth $50 per hour vs. $250 per hour.
However, how a client views your search marketing offering depends in large part on how you present and sell the solution. If you are flogging search marketing like a commodity, the client will expect a great deal more for less. Though very different from the legal model, search marketing holds a position in the services industry. It is yet unclear whether clients value the work enough to consider it ‘tertiary level, professional services’ – however, if they do not, this is in large part a fault of the industry itself with the rogue & cowboy manner in which it has presented itself in the past.
Search marketing has to have a serious offering on the table to be treated seriously by clients. The overwhelming presence of poor quality solutions that pervade the market serve only to devalue the market value of search marketing solutions. Only when clear benchmarks are set will search marketing be able to draw a clearer line in the sand, defining its value, even by hourly rate.
