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How Much Does SEO Cost?

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With the SEO industry being difficult to understand for business owners we thought we would help by writing this blog post about “How Much Does SEO Cost?“.

How Much Is SEO Per Month?

SEO ConsultantWith every SEO campaign, we work on we will face different obstacles and different competitors. This is important to understand at the start of the SEO journey. If we are working on local SEO for a relatively uncompetitive industry sector it should be easy to achieve rankings with a decent website built on a good platform providing the content is unique and well written. So in this instance, SEO per month may be relatively low cost covering basic hours of labour and resources.

When you then look at national or a global SEO campaign in a highly competitive sector, this will require a huge amount of work to achieve success and as a result this SEO campaign will require much more labour to achieve the SEO goal.

Due to this we would recommend steering clear of SEO companies who can price an SEO campaign for you instantly as this suggests they do not understand the tasks ahead of them. Also it is important to note that every website has a different past and if a website has been worked on by a less than decent SEO company you may find when you carry out a health check that the website backlink profile is a mess and require a lot of work to fix things before you can start moving a website forwards in the search engines.

It might be the case that the website domain name is also brand new with no historical past, so why would Google trust this website. New domains need more external work than historical domains so as a result of this we would question any SEO company able to price a campaign without researching into the domain historical past.

The cost of SEO will vary as a result of the research and also the country in which the work is being carried out. In the UK you need to spend on average for a decent SEO Consultant £35.00 to £110.00 per hour, so if you work on this factor you can see that a company quoting £50 per month simply isn’t going to be doing the job.

It is also important to note that the cost of the software used by SEO consultants is often paid for a monthly basis and the more the tools are used the more they cost. Without the core SEO tools it is difficult to carry out SEO services and this means the majority of SEO companies will be using the core software available and spending over £1,000 per month as a minimum.

Semrush SEO Costs

Ahrefs SEO Costs

Majestic SEO Costs

MOZ SEO Costs

If we then look at SEO products offered by companies like GoDaddy we wonder what exactly is being purchased here. This might be great and achieving results and we wish clients using the service success.

GoDaddy SEO services

So officially you need to look at the spend on SEO per month and think does this give an SEO consultant enough time to achieve your success which leads us to the question…

How Much Should I Spend On SEO Per Month?

The question of how much you should spend on SEO per month should be looked at in terms of the value it can add to your business. For example, if you sell products or services that cost £10,000 with a £2,000 markup then being number one in Google could bring sales that if you sold only five products or services in one month you will have £10,000 profit per month and this could be as a result of this spending £1,000 per month on SEO to achieve this, which would be a great ROI.

Another example, if you are a CCTV company paying £1,000 per month for SEO and you get 10 to 30 leads per month from commercial clients looking at spending £5,000 to £80,000 on CCTV and security with on-going maintenance and support then the £1,000 per month SEO would be a good investment and grow the business each month with new clients.

CCTV SEO Keywords

If you then factor in that you could be using Google Adwords and using just one keyword “CCTV systems” which Google suggests achieves 18,100 searches per month in the UK, you would need to spend a minimum of $1.14 per click, if you do the maths you need a huge budget per day to achieve 24 hour a day adverts to be shown.

Organic SEO would be showing 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no budget constraints and also there is a large majority of Internet users who simply do not click on Google Adwords and will bypass the ads looking for Google Maps listing to find local companies or the top organic search results to find what it is they are looking for.

It is clear that the value of SEO is huge to any business, so the question should be “Are we spending enough on SEO” not “how much should I spend on SEO per month”…

How Much Does SEO Cost?

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SEO professionals are asked ‘How much does SEO cost?’ everyday and everyday have to give the same answer of ‘it depends’. The process of SEO is not an exact science so setting prices is an impossibility without first completing research into the website and sector that the customer is enquiring about.

When a customer goes into a shop and buys a new DVD there is a set price tag on it as every copy of that DVD will be exactly the same. However, SEO cannot work like this as every website is different and has many outside factors and influences which will have an impact on the level of SEO needed to make it a success.

The internal factors of the optimisation of a website include adding quality content, ensuring that the meta data is updated and relevant to each page and headers are appropriate. Whilst the basic principles are the same, the execution can be very different. For example, updating and making relevant the meta data for a website with 15 pages will take a lot less time than a site with 50 pages; the service is the same, but the time taken to complete the task is different therefore the SEO cost for the 50 page site will be bigger than for the 15 page one.

External factors pay a large role in the cost of SEO as they determine the amount of research needed into the sector and how difficult it will be to gain a place on Google page one. For example, a client has a website selling car insurance who wants to be on page one for the term ‘car insurance’. This is a very competitive term as there are many websites in the industry all optimising for the same key words; therefore, this will take a lot of optimising, link building and time to see an improvement in ranking. In contrast to this, a company in a niche or specialised market will have a lot less competition for keywords and so it will be easier to rank for preferred keywords. This is also the same for companies who wish to focus on localised searches e.g. Chelsea hairdresser rather than London hairdresser as less people will be fighting for that keyword.

Ultimately then, asking ‘How much does SEO cost?’ is like asking ‘How long is a piece of string?’, it depends. A price should be individual to the client and campaign, taking into account all outside factors and a realistic time frame in which results are expected.