How much does seo really cost!

How much does SEO cost? It’s the proverbial, “How long is a piece of string?” question. And if you think about it, this is not without good reason. SEO is not as easy to nail down as, say, sending out a direct mail campaign to 100 recipients. In some ways, it is not always as easy to measure, as many marketing activities may impact organic search traffic.

The cost of SEO is also directly related to the potential rewards. Ranking nationally for a highly prized keyword that may be £10 per click in AdWords will have far more costs associated with it than ranking for a locally oriented keyword. But even on a local level, there can be huge variability — and whether you want to rank in a state, county, city, town or micro-area like a borough or village will influence how difficult this will be. This, of course, influences the price of SEO for your unique situation.

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SEO prices: What determines cost?

SEO pricing has to consider the following variables:

• Situation. Where are you currently?
• Objectives. Where do you want to be?
• Timeline. How fast do you want to improve?

Only by looking at these three elements can any agency calculate how much SEO should cost for your business.

Let’s consider the following example:

• A local business site currently ranks in the 12th position for their main target keyword (and variations thereof).
• Competitors on the first page have more links and higher authority metrics.
• Competitors have invested more in local SEO.

With this information, some metrics can be determined:

• An approximate amount of links
• An idea of how much work is needed on the local SEO front
• A rough timeline to achieve this

By analyzing a client’s current situation, understanding their objectives and determining the required timeline, we can calculate a price. There are lots of variables here, and we don’t always know what our competitors are doing, but an attempt should be made to calculate the level of work required and subsequent price.

And of course, the industry will in part determine costs. If you make £100 from a new customer, you can expect to pay less than if a customer is worth several thousand pounds. The marketplace, to some extent, regulates price (assuming the work is done properly). It is all about return on investment.

The last variable is maintenance and keeping your flag flying once visibility has been achieved. SEO is a moving target. You step up your game, and the competition does the same. It’s tough, and the best approaches need to be tailored to the unique situation and goals of the business.

High-quality SEO vs. cheap and nasty

Which brings us to the other key variable here: quality. A little story here may help illustrate the qualitative issues that still abound in the SEO industry.

This week, a local PPC client of ours called us up and detailed a sales to call they had received from a local SEO firm. This firm was trying to sell them SEO and detailed the process that they would use to build backlinks. The gist of this process was to find relevant websites that had expired, buy those sites, and then place content on them that links to the target site.

This is essentially a PBN (Private Blog Network), a network of sites that is under the control of a single entity (in this case, the SEO company) and used to artificially build links. This approach has many names: link farm, link network, blog network and so on. This is what Google would classify as a link scheme, and it’s something they have been targeting with manual penalties and algorithmic adjustments since 2014.

Thing is, this client was sold. They wanted it. After all, it sounded too good to be true. But when things sound too good to be true, they often are. Really, alarm bells should have been ringing when this supposed SEO company was doing speculative telesales. But that is a whole other story.

The point here is that there are services in the UK that offer SEO for £50 per quarter. Or £15 a month. Realistically, what kind of marketing can be done for £15 a month? These services are either doing nothing or utilizing owned networks of sites to add links.

At best, they are largely ineffective. At worst, you could end up with a penalty or some form of negative equity. Cheap, yes. Nasty, most definitely. If you are building a long-term business, you don’t want to focus on these bottom-of-the-barrel strategies.

The takeaway here is that you are responsible for what is done in your name. If you employ a cheap SEO company and don’t do the research, then this will be very much your problem when things don’t work (or you are penalized).

If you are building a business, you need to play by the rules of the biggest marketing platform out there. And the rules are not always terribly clear. But think in terms of value and common sense, and you won’t fall foul of the thousands of frankly unethical, back-street SEO companies out there.

It is not all bad news, though. There are over 5 million small businesses in the UK and around 30 million in the US, and the majority of these have really poor SEO. So, the barrier to entry here is often not terribly steep. Just remember the four variables of situation, objectives, speed, and quality.

Enough already! How much does SEO Cost?

Caveats aside. The following is based on our experience and the studies we have been able to plunder to get some data.

SEO prices in the UK

There is no study as such, but being at the helm of an SEO and PPC agency and having worked with thousands of businesses over the years, I do have some insight into what pricing looks like.

• £50-£150 per month — low-end SEO (or low competition)
• £150-£300 per month — mid-range small business SEO
• £300-£500 per month — more competitive mid-range SEO
• £500-£1,000 per month — high-end small business SEO (usually a national business)
• £1,000-£2,000 per month — high-quality for competitive industries
• £2,000 upwards per month — high-value businesses with content-led SEO approach. Typically a national or multi-location business.

In practice, what we see is that the general street-level SEO companies tend to work from £300 upwards. Then there are some online small business SEOproviders that work from around £50 to £150 per month. It is hard to know what some of these actually do to add value.

What should you be spending?

The prices above are all relative, though. If you are a small but national business in a competitive space, then you are going to need to pay more for SEO than a small business in a local space. Think e-commerce online store versus a local plumber. The size of your market and potential profit will to some extent dictate what you should be spending to be in the running.

So, what should you pay? How do you determine the value of SEO? The only true answer to this question lies in your business and current situation. If profits are big, expect more competition. If profit is low, then typically, there will be less competition. If you have a long way to go, expect to pay more than if you just need a final push into the top three. First get a free seo audit on my website and from there we can help you build a strategy. Click here

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