How To Justify The Cost Of Search Engine Optimization Consultants

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engine optimization is not a cheap process with cost ranging from $35 per page to $100 per page. If you have a website with 20 pages then you are going to pay from around $700 for very basic services upwards to around $2000. So how do you justify those costs.

Justifying costs and setting a budget for search engine optimization is no different to setting a budget for advertising, salaries or any other area within a business. The real justification comes in the results. You can almost place a good search engine optimization campaign in the same basket as advertising, the aim of both is to get people onto your site, hopefully to spend money.

If you had to write a report for management justifying the cost of a search engine optimization campaign, then perhaps the following figures may help – let’s face it, management like numbers and want the bottom line, not the fluff.

Take a baseline of $50 per page with a website of 20 pages. That is a cost of $1000 for a good search engine optimization campaign on those 20 pages. The hard part is then trying to determine what sort of traffic could be generated. Statistics show that around 80% of users access their information through one of the search engines.

A check on the number of times a particular keyword is used in the search engines is a good start. Checking competitors to see what sort of traffic they are receiving is a second area to look at. A good search engine optimization consultant can provide you with a rough idea of what share of this traffic you may be able to acquire.

To justify costs, you need to be able to get your visitors from the search engines at less than the cost of an Adwords pay-per-click campaign so knowing what sort of costs are involved there will also help.

If you can see each page bringing in an extra 100 visitors per month, that’s 2000 visitors per month for all 20 pages, the cost works out at $0.50 per visitor. However, the cost to optimize these pages is generally a one off so you can reasonably extrapolate those figures to an annual basis. Over a 12 month period the cost per visitor works out at around $0.04 cents each.

Now do a comparison with any other form of advertising. I think you will find that four cents per visitor is one of the cheapest costs around. It can be easy to justify the cost of a good search engine optimization program if you collate all the facts and do some simple maths. It can beat pay-per-click advertising hands down.