Pricing SEO is complex.
Let’s start with a useful example: what does a rope cost? A rope’s price depends on how many meters you need, what you need that rope for, its quality, how long you want it to last, etc. You can buy the cheapest rope in the market, but, will that rope fulfill your needs?
Hiring an SEO expert is very similar. Just like a rope has its per meter price, SEO has a per hour rate. The amount of hours you pay for, depend on many factors. How high are you willing to jump? How fast are you going to jump?
You need to have these answers in order to estimate how much time and resources you need to invest in SEO.
Another example: buying SEO is like buying a car, your price will match your needs.
The price you invest in a car will depend on the make and the model, size and purpose, etc.
SEO experts also range in price depending on what services you want from them. The best SEO strategy begins by evaluating needs and problems of your prospective clients. It then comes to attracting the most relevant leads.
Setting up your website to do this effectively and well isn’t easy. Research and analysis come first, often followed by a face to face meeting with clients to gather all relevant information.
It’s important to highlight that what you pay for SEO, is not exactly what it will cost you.
What you pay for SEO is only defined by the ROI.
If an SEO expert enhance your business’ sales and you get 20 times what you paid, SEO didn’t cost you anything.
Effective SEO must deliver an elevated ROI
It is not only about getting high rankings and more traffic, clicks and page views. It’s about converting those visitors into paying customers.
Effective, or more expensive SEO consulting will help you:
Getting these SEO elements right takes time. Knowing where to begin for the best, fastest results will takes tremendous research. But the investment is worthwhile, because it will earn you a high return.
That’s why SEO should never be viewed as a cost. It’s an investment. One that pays off for a long time.
But we want to reiterate: SEO isn’t simple. Google rates websites based on over 200 ranking criteria and tweaks the algorithm up to 600 times in a year. Hence if an SEO consultant takes a quick look at your website and quotes you a full price for SEO, be careful.
You might get some weaknesses fixed, but long-lasting SEO means much more than that
SEO isn’t something you can plug in to your website. Effective SEO is a process.
Research and planning are critical components of good SEO. This is the reason why SEO experts cannot make an estimate easily, or set a price per site for their services.
It’s extremely important that while asking for SEO budgets, your possible providers study your project carefully before they give you a price. If someone gives you a price for an SEO job without knowing much about your project, its probably not worth your trust; without assessing your specific needs or without even looking at what your competition is doing, is not possible to make a budget.
Everything depends upon your objectives, the nature of your business, your audience, your competitors and other relevant factors such as:
The time and dedication given to the project: Will someone work the same for 50 euros than for 300 euros? We might think that the price per hour of the two consultants or agencies is different, but someone who charges 50€/month will not dedicate much time and efforts to your project, since the benefits they will get to work on it are insignificant.
We have heard many of our clients complaining because investing in SEO didn’t work for them, many others feeling they had invested money in SEO for nothing.
It is not that SEO didn’t work, they just didn’t invest enough resources, and hired cheap SEO
The tools and techniques used: We are going to put two examples of tools that are basic in any SEO project. SEMrush and Ahrefs.
SEMrush or Ahrefs are not available to anyone, their price is around 100 euros per month in their cheapest version. This means those professionals considering budgets of 50 euros per month do not use these tools.
It is not enough to generate content for SEO, it has to be done properly. Most importantly, choosing the keywords to position your content is essential. For this, SEO experts have to analyse a lot and have data that is difficult to obtain with free tools.
Conclusion:
We cannot give an exact figure, because each project is different and requires a different amount of hours, which at the end will determine the final price.
However, we can confirm that in most projects that require an SEO agency or consultant to achieve results, the price will not be 50 euros per month. Not even a 100 euros. We are not saying that a budget of 300 euros per month will give good results either. It’s all about what the company with which you are going to work for, is offering you.
It’s advisable that after asking for several budgets, you compare them and select the ones that you find interesting, and check which professionals can best carry out your project.
They won’t be the ones who overwhelm you with weird words and make you understand nothing. Nor those who say “I assure you that I can position” or “I offer guaranteed results” or “we know exactly how Google works.”
Good SEO experts are going to show an interest in your business
They will ask questions such as what products work best in your store or the ones with the most margin .
They will tell you that in order to work they need access to your web analytics tool (Google Analytics) and Search Console, because they are ways of verifying that the work that is being done to position a website is paying off.
Let’s never forget that we position a website to get more visits, but we do it because our products are good and competitive and we hope to sell more with that traffic that we are taking to our website.
If you want to have the website you want or increase the online visibility of your brand, we know how to do it.
Shall we start today?
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