I ask every guest to hand a question to the next one. Patrick Stox, six and a half years at Ahrefs and newly independent, did not ask me about algorithms.
“my problem isn’t really an SEO right now. It’s it’s getting used to the business stuff and contracts and all that stuff again. And it’s just time consuming. All that stuff is kind of annoying to set up… what do you write in the contract? How do you handle the sales, the leads? Get rid of tire kickers.”
— Patrick Stox, Unscripted SEO
That is one of the best-known technical SEOs in the industry saying the hard part is the paperwork. I passed the question to Rob Bonham, who has done a ton of contract and freelance work across two decades. Here is what came back, plus what I would add from my own scar tissue.
Scope creep is a drafting problem, not a client problem
“you have to make sure that you are setting the right expectations so you don’t get scope creeped, so you don’t work yourself into a hole. that that’s my that’s my biggest my biggest piece of advice”
— Rob Bonham, Unscripted SEO
His test for a six or twelve month roadmap is whether you can actually deliver every line of it at a standard you would sign your name to. If you cannot, he would rather you cut your margin and bring in help than ship late and half-done. He is unusually candid about why:
“that’s happened to me before in in my career earlier on and it’s it’s a terrible feeling and and you you don’t want to let your you know your partners down”
— Rob Bonham
Price for your tenure, then check it against the market
Rob’s pricing advice is three words long — “don’t sell yourself short” — followed by a sanity check. Charge less when you are new, charge more at ten or fifteen years in, and make sure the number makes sense to the client as well as to you. He suggests using an AI assistant to get a starting read on market rate, with a caveat: “Don’t just trust the first AI answer.”
I will add the uncomfortable half. A higher price is itself a quality signal. If you race to the bottom of the barrel you can absolutely price yourself out of a great engagement, because the buyer reads a cheap number as either incompetence or a scam. Charge three times more and win three fewer contracts and you have done the same amount of work for the same money, with more room to do it properly.
The paid mini-audit is the tire-kicker filter
This is the most immediately usable thing Rob said:
“I typically will charge, you know, a small fee for, you know, putting together an audit or you know, a cursory overview of their site, even if it’s just like, you know, a fifteen minute Loom video going over their website and showing opportunities there. You know, maybe maybe it’s not not a ton. Maybe you’re charging hey, you know, I’ll do this Loom video for fifty bucks”
— Rob Bonham
Fifty dollars will not change your year. It changes who books the call. It also gives you a chance to deliver something on time and complete before either of you is committed, which he frames as the real product: “it shows that your time is valuable and it also shows that you know, you’re you’re you’re working you’re both working in good faith.”
Matthew Slaymaker runs the same play on the ads side. His agency offers one free audit at a time, normally priced at five hundred dollars, and he was frank on the show about why the free version has an expiry date: “I’m tired. I’ve been doing so many audits recently. I’m like, I’m ready to start getting paid for these again.”
The payment term that quietly costs you two months
Enterprise work pays more reliably than small clients, and it comes with red tape. I have taken a drug test to edit a website. I have sat through four meetings with ten people to change one H1 on a major healthcare site. That is survivable. This is the part that is not:
- Invoice at the start of the month, not the end. Net 30 from an end-of-month invoice means you wait roughly two months for money you have already earned. Net 30 from a first-of-month invoice is a normal month.
- Ask to be paid up front for next month’s work. Put it in the contract. You will not always get it. You will sometimes get it.
- Get at least half before you start. Letting clients pay later is the single most expensive habit I picked up as a freelancer.
- Be choosy about capacity. Rob’s line is that taking work you are maxed out on “is gonna put you and the client both in a bad position.”
The round table
Two separate guests handed me the same question inside a week, which is usually a sign the industry has a gap rather than a preference. So I am putting together a panel on the mechanics of SEO consulting — contracts, retainers versus outcomes, expectation setting, and which clients to fire. Patrick’s response when I told him: “that that’s awesome. I’ll watch that episode.”
If you have been burned by a term you did not read closely enough, I would like to hear about it before we record.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed for false starts and filler only. More at Unscripted SEO and SEO Arcade.