What I found on the internet was, alot of SEO consultants base their pricing according to how many sites are competing with the same search term. This is wrong! The reason why it's wrong is it doesnt mean anything. I will tell you why.

If you research the backlinks of the top 10 sites that appear on the first pages, lets say your site has 0 backlinks and the sites that appear on home page of Google for example all have around 10,000-20,000 backlinks of quality PR, this essentially means regardless of the search competition, you also have to obtain around the same amount of backlinks with the same pr and value before you will even have a chance to show up before them.

Generally speaking the search term could be melbourne singles and the results are just 1 - 10 of about 463,000 for melbourne singles. (0.28 seconds) so one would think that anything below 1 million is no problem and would base their pricing accordingly.

The mistake again is they base their pricing to clients based on the search volume and yet this means nothing particularly if the first page contains sites that are highly competitive or are appearing on 1st page becuase they all have 100,000 high pr backlinks.

Another thing is lets say an seo company is bidding for the keyphrase SEO Melbourne you would be surprised that even though using the Google Ads Tool it shows that there is 4000 global searches per month on this term, and one would expect a reasonable volume of enquiries, I am positioned on the first page for this term but I can tell you this is not the case.

A good majority of the search volume you will find competitors searching for this term. A client that is looking to use SEO services in Melbourne would generally instead type in something like "how to get on the 1st page of Google". You must sometimes think with a simple frame of mind and try to put yourself in the customers shoes. So with this in mind even with low search volume targeting niche words are more valuable.

In general you should allow for atleast 30% of the overall search volume to be included when you calculate the overall amount that Google Ads data displays, so the 30% would generally be competitors.

So if you are a client and you have already a good idea about what the search volume means and what to expect then just be cautious if you get quoted purely based on the search volume as it usually is a very misleading way to calculate pricing this way.