SEO Prices
*Please note the above video is only a bit of humour and wasn’t an actual client
SEO Prices
Have you ever went out to get a quote from a couple of SEO companies and had quotes that have a massive variation in price? This seems to be common with many people with a number of people out there charging outrageous sums of money for monthly SEO packages.
It’s not for me to dictate the price of monthly SEO across the board however when agencies say payout £300 per month to a Freelance SEO but charge 4k per month for the service then there is something massively wrong in terms of getting value for money, and the big questions is always, how do you price SEO? Or what are you paying for and what work is actually being done.
Most people have overheads of some kind, whether you are an agency or a freelancer you will have either staff or remote workers working on your team so there is that cost, office costs, software costs, content costs, link costs as well as some other costs such as proxies and a few other bits and bobs depending on your process and what you are doing.
How many man-hours go into an SEO campaign?
So when pricing SEO work for people a frequently asked question is how many man-hours goes into SEO, but as I said above there are many other costs that are factored into pricing an SEO campaign, it’s not based on man-hours, it’s based on a number of different things alongside trying to compete with the competition and do as much work as they are doing if not more.
So what is an SEO’s prices based on ?
Some of the things I would be looking at when pricing an SEO campaign would be
Amount of content and landing pages required
Software costs
Level of reporting
Client communication
Link Costs
Staff costs
Outsourced work
This is on top of any actual research and work being done on the website, you also have to value your SEO and their experience too.
There is always going to be variables when pricing SEO, some clients want a monthly meeting alongside their reporting, and make no mistake that time is charged for so if you want someone to come out and talk you through your report, you are likely to have an increased cost for your monthly SEO package.
Some people employ project managers to keep the clients away from them doing day to day SEO and is a cost to a business and would be unreasonable to think that communication and all of the other costs would not be passed onto you the client. That is worth thinking about when you are asking your SEO what work they’re doing you want to know what output they are doing, what actionable things are taking place that will make a difference to your SEO and ROI.
It is very often the case that more than 50% of someone’s budget is spent on client reporting and conversations and meaningless meetings, any time allocated to your project will be taken away with this type of no value work.
So what does a fair SEO cost?
There isn’t an exact answer to this question, all I would say is that be sure when asking for SEO services from a provider that they don’t simply outsource the work for peanuts and keep the rest for their pockets. I could value myself at £20 per hour, and the next guy might want £40 per hour and if both of us provide results then you probably have a fair SEO cost. But the reality is there is no hourly cost with most SEOs, all the factors are taken into account and then presented to you as a monthly SEO cost.
If I was getting SEO services from someone I’d probably want to know
How many keywords are they targeting for my monthly budget
How much time is spent creating content both onsite and content marketing/guest blogging
How much time is spent doing outreach or pitching for links
How much time is spent on doing your report and analysing analytics and other tools
Are there any other things being done that contribute to a better SEO campaign
SEO is not magic its a combination of hard work and a process of events that take place that will get you better rankings, but be sure that when hiring someone to do your SEO that you understand where your budget is going, client education is important and long term makes the SEO‘s job a lot easier, there is no need for meaningless pie charts and talking garbage, you can be open and transparent and still offer good value to the client.
If you are interested in finding out what we can do for your monthly budget then get in touch with me using the button below and we can discuss your options.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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