I was just checking the stats for one of my SEO clients this morning and saw some very decent results – they are on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for converged voice and they are number one on Yahoo and Google, and number 2 on Bing for converged messaging.  What is something like that worth a client?  How much is a service and results like this worth?  It’s hard to say and varies very much between industries and between actual search terms.    There are many factors to take into consideration when determining the value of SEO, rankings in the search engines, etc.  One is on page factors that contribute to conversions.  You can get a page ranked number one for every term in the world, but if the pages they land on don’t compel them to take action, or do some sort of action, input a name and e-mail for futuer contact, sign up for a free report, sign up for a service, etc. then there really is no inherent value in ranking, other than possible branding, or brag rights, etc. 

One inportant factor to take into consideration is comercial intent.  Microsoft has developed a tool to determine commercial intent for a keyword/keyphrase.  You can also use this tool Market Samurai: http://bit.ly/vSRj4  to determine the commercial intent of keywords as well as MUCH more information.  I use this tool with every client and project I work on.  I consider it mandatory pretty much.   Check out more abouit commercial intent at Microsoft’s site:  http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/   Basically it tells you the percentage chance that someone typing in that keyword or keyphrase is going to buy.  You can use Market Samurai to determine this for large groups of keywords at a time.

Besides the “commercial intent” of a particular keyword pharse, you have the PPC values for it, or pay per click values.  How much others are currently paying to rank for a specific term.  You can also get these values in the  Market Samurai keyword module here, and you can get them also at the Google Adwords keyword tool.  With the google adwords tool, select average PPC values from the drop down menu on the right.

I’m going to do a more complete post about how I work with clients to determine the value of an SEO campain with them soon.  Sign up for my e-mail list to the right to be notified when it comes out and good luck.