The Costs of SEO Services

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can come with a wide range of prices when offered as a professional service. SEO involves optimizing a website to give it a better chance of ranking high on specific key terms used in an online search.

If you’ve just started looking into SEO then you may be surprised to find that you will likely come across an extreme range of prices, from a couple of hundred dollars up to tens of thousands.

How The Costs of SEO Have Changed

Search engine optimization has come a long way since the origin of search engines. A couple of years ago you could hire a company to help rank you on search engines and only pay a couple of hundred bucks resulting in pretty high rankings within a few months.

Unfortunately, search engines, like Google, have continually worked to provide the best, most relevant search results possible and in doing so they have created algorithms that now pick up on bad SEO practices and spamming techniques which were used in the past. Now, to get ranked well on a search engine, you must do a lot more quality work to get that same ranking, and therefore the cost of SEO services has gone up.

A high-performance, experienced SEO company will now charge much more for SEO services as more work must be done to get good rankings.

Search engines want to see quality, original content, and therefore if your website provides that, then you’re more likely to rank higher on searches. To accomplish this goal good quality articles and content must be written for your site and blog.  This takes time and expertise, resulting in higher costs.

City-Specific SEO VS National SEO Costs

Another factor involved with SEO is the geographic target. If your business is a local company that only wants people within your local area to find you, then it means less competition and less work needed to be ranked. For instance, if you’re a local business hiring an online advertising & SEO company, the fees may range from $1500 to $3000 per month.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, if you’re a national or international company in a competitive industry and you want to show up on the first page of Google, you’ll likely be looking at a cost of $5000 to $10,000+ per month for quality SEO services.

Why There’s A Monthly Cost For SEO Services

As you may already be aware, search engine optimization does involve tweaks to the website in order for search engines to read it better and also help the verbiage focus its aim on specific keywords. That is just the start of SEO. Getting enough “oomph” to snag that coveted spot at the top of page 1 will require a lot more work though and requires regular website updates and new content.

It generally takes about 6 months to get the most out of quality SEO work at which point you would need to maintain your top position or keep working to push above your tougher competition. Companies that offer a one-time-fee of SEO services may possibly be able to get you ranked on search engines with just one month of work but it is likely that your site will quickly slip down the slippery slope of rankings as your competitors continue to optimize their sites and add content, making you look like the unpopular kid in school.

Do I Really Need A Lot of Money For SEO?

If you’re a young company then you may find it difficult to fork up several thousands of marketing dollars to afford SEO services that actually work. Thankfully there are quite a few other methods of online advertising that can help and have a smaller price tag. One of the most cost-effective methods is Remarketing.

Remarketing allows you to advertise to people who have already visited your website by following them around the web and showing your ads to them. It works well because most users who have already visited your site are likely to only click on your ad if they are finally ready to come back to your site and convert it into business. In most cases, you only pay per click, so the costs are very low.

Caution is key to avoiding scams, so make sure you’re only using the best company for SEO services. If a company charges significantly less for SEO, then you probably won’t get much for it. A great way to see if a company really knows how to do quality SEO services is to do a quick search on Google for “SEO Company”. The site that is ranked on top obviously knows how to do SEO as they’re able to keep themselves on top and can likely keep you on top as well.

Looking for a more specific price sheet? Click here to view a price sheet survey info-graph.

If you want to explore your available options for SEO services and get a quote for your specific company, get a quote from the top SEO company by clicking here.