SEO is a business, and one that can provide both the client investing in SEO and the SEO professional with substantial income. Search Engine Optimization has become one of the hottest and most effective marketing tools available, and business owners are lining up to invest in such a service.
Most business owners hear about SEO from a business partner or a colleague who knows a little bit about the strategy, and inevitably their first question is always related to cost – How much? How long? What is the bottom line?
Like most industries, costs and fees can and will vary. When looking at hiring an SEO professional or an SEO company, get an idea of who they’ve worked for and take a look at their successes with their previous/existing clients. If they’ve shown proven success, chances are you will also see success. Only then should you start looking at cost. If a large company in the heart of downtown has the same success rate as the work-from-home SEO small business owner next door, chances are the latter is going to charge you a lot less than the corporate giant.
Many, if not most SEO businesses charge an initial fee, sometimes called an “Initial Analysis” fee or something related to this. Keep in mind this isn’t a cash grab – its the rate of the average amount of time it takes an SEO professional or business to take an in-depth look into the client’s site to see what has been and what needs to be done, as well as taking and in-depth look into their competitors’ sites to see what they need to do to exceed their competitors’ SEO efforts. This initial fee can range from a few hundred dollars to over three thousand dollars, depending on how in-depth the analysis is and the overhead required to be covered. Typically, an initial fee will be in the one to two thousand dollar range.
Additionally, many SEO professionals will require a client to commit to an SEO contract, where they are required to invest X amount of dollars per month for X amount of months. Generally, SEO businesses get most of their work done and revenue received from their monthly work for their client. Typically, the client will agree to either X amount of hours per month at X dollars per hour, or X tasks completed each month for X price. Again, such a contract is not a cash grab. From the moment and SEO business starts work on a client’s website, it can take up to 12 months for that site to be properly indexed/re-indexed in Google’s search rankings, and the ranking of all other search engines. This is something we as SEO professionals and businesses have absolutely zero control over. All we can do is start work as soon as the client gives us the go ahead. Again, committing a client to a contract is a matter of protecting their interests. If a client decides to stop investing in SEO services 4 months into a job because they’ve seen no ranking improvement, it is because the search engines have yet to re-index their site and cutting all SEO work is just going to make things work as they’ll end up with an incomplete site.
For an idea on what you can expect to be charged, most SEO businesses start monthly rates at around $200 for single-page websites and can range upwards of $3K per month for large-scale, multi-product/service sites.
If you are worried about what you’re being charged or quoted, contact us and we’ll be happy to give our advice.