How Much Should Good SEO Cost?
Should search engine optimization services be free? Should they be expensive? Flat rate? Commission only? What should the SEO charge?
It is difficult to answer this question because not everyone needs the same SEO services. Some people need a little tweak on their website and that is all. Other people need a complete overhaul. Some businesses would do fine to trade out their template with another one. Others would benefit greatly from a long-term link building plan.
Every situation is different, every business is different, and every optimization plan is different. Because of the differences in businesses and the needs of SEO clients, no reputable firm can guarantee results in a certain period of time and if someone tries to sell you a one-size-fits-all SEO plan then you should run for the hills as fast as you can.
Some SEOs are great at on-page optimization. Others are better at link building. You should first identify your need and that might mean getting a consultation or an assessment of you website. But there’s no way someone can tell you what it will cost you to SEO your website until they’ve had a chance to evaluate you need and tell you what activities and services are necessary to help you reach your goals.
32 Responses to “How Much Should Good SEO Cost?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Everything you wrote is accurate. In addition, I find it also depends heavily on how much work the client is willing to do on their own behalf. Two items that probably have some of the largest impact on SEO scores is fresh content and inbound links. Obviously on both of those items there are all kinds of subtleties that need to be taken into account, but both are also time consuming.
If you train your clients to do these two items and do them right and then just consult with them on a “as needed” basis to make adjustments and improvements they can actually make a lot of great progress. The alternative is the client doesn’t do this and the consultant does, which can be expensive.
The third, and in my opinion the worst, scenario is the client that doesn’t want to pay someone and won’t do the work on their own, but wants someone to work miracles for a very small fee. When building a business many consultants will tell you that you can put up time or money to make the business a success, but at least one and most likely both are eventually required. It is the same with SEO in many cases.
I actually train my clients on how to do SEO and encourage them to do a lot of the time consuming (and hence expensive) work themselves. I work with them on an as needed basis. This actually allows me to help a lot more people at once than if I only offered “hand holding” services. I will hand hold, but that comes with a higher price tag.
Hi Michael – Thanks for your comment, very good points…I agree with you custom SEO training is a way to go as well…
Michael, it is very refreshing to see someone mention that training clients to do a few things themselves and to be available for when they need you.
You are exactly right. great blog post Nick and great added info Michael.
Hi Chris – Thanks for reading and your comment!
Hi Nick, I’ve been catching your articles all over the web for a while now, I wound up here today via your SEMPO group discussion on Linkedin. I agree that the notion of a cookie-cutter SEO solution is a bad idea for any business, as your needs will be determined by your specific goals and the work that is required to get you there. This obviously varies significantly from one project to another. I’ve also learned training your clients can help save the both of you a significant amount of time and money, as Michael pointed out above.
Hi Shareef – Thanks for reading…it is amazing that many people still think SEO boxed type solutions really work, as reiterated, every client is totally different and have different goals, etc…
Guys,
All of the above comments are very helpful to me, running a 12-person small agency in Stockholm, Sweden. What I was wondering is if someone could put some hard numbers on the table, given the fact that – of course – the spans and amounts will vary quite a bit, depending on a clients needs.
Thanks
David Gray, CEO, Open Communications AB Stockholm
Hi David – Thanks for reading and your comment…Since every client, industry and competition is different so it is tough to put a dollar value without know specific details…some clients need to outsource, bring their SEO in house and even a combination of outsource and training/consulting.
Nick, thank you for the post. I’ve been thinking another alternative is to use google’s estimate on the traffic of major keywords, how much it charge of PPC and then charge a portion of the PPC cost (like 50%) times the monthly traffic as the monthly fee. How do you think of it?
Wes Cheng
Director of Technology, iBayBiz Inc.
Hi Wes – Thanks for reading and your comment…I think you might have PPC Management and SEO mixed up…to price out PPC Management I would test different pricing models as it makes sense for the types of businesses and media budgets you are looking to target. For how to price out SEO, honestly that is a major question and discussion and would require much more time to try to explain…Best of luck with your website and SEM firm.
Hi Nick! Thanks for your responses. The reason for using the PPC-like pricing to price out SEO is that I ran into some clients who understand PPC better. To convince them using SEO, I showed them how much traffic SEO can get and I would charge them a lower price than PPC. Hopefully that explains a bit better… True, SEO is really hard to price.
Have been reading your messages for a few months and definitely would like to contribute more if I’m capable of. Best wishes to your company too!! -Wes
Hi Wes – Sure thing, I agree SEO does tend to be very tough to price out especially when so many SEM firms price it out so drastically different…thanks again!
I think the SEO cost correlates with the Search Engine performance.
For me It depends on a variety of factors but the 2 most important are the competition and the geo targeting.
Hello Wes, I have considered using a such a model, but the difficulty I have found is the time that would be spent counting the keywords driven from your seo activities. You are also fighting against if they also have a strong brand with some clients having 30% and others 80% of their traffic brand terms my thoughts are they don’t want to pay you for those terms.
But to speed up the process there is also software that automatically calculates this, but depending on the industry you might be getting $1 keyword or $25 keyword and can depend on traffic volume.
If i’m working in a very niche industry such as mine equipment you are not going to get hundreds of visitors each day, but it may be a very successful campaign with just 10-20 visitors. It also leaves out the value driven from successful link building campaigns.
As a % of the overall project it might be worthwhile atleast for bonuses but can be useful for responding to client views they think they would get better value from AdWords…
Another way to compare prices etc… is to base it on hours, if im going to charge X and estimate its 20 hours but you say its only 15 hours at X… its easier to estimate workload.
If someone says they are only going to spend 5 hours a month on seo/link building/reporting and adwords campaigns… something doesn’t add up…
I have been putting off SEO until I felt my web site was almost perfect … but I am beginning to believe it will always need more work. I read all the articles sent to me on SEO and am trying to do a better job on my page descriptions… I need someone to look at my site and tell me what I am doing right and where I have gone wrong. If this is what you do then please … contact me.
Hi Nick.
How to price SEO, good question! From my personal experience, I wish a component of the pricing was based on RESULTS. This way, the customer would be assured that whatever work was done was indeed the correct work and was done properly.
I naively hired a traffic generating company that I trusted because I THOUGHT I knew them well already. They promised a customized link building campaign, heavy on social media and article marketing, general help with web mastering, marketing and monetizing. It was supposed to be a very all encompassing program. I had turned to them to do a lot of stuff I did not know how to do.
Well, to make a very long story short, $12,500 later, I had a website that only got about 100 people a day. It was making $0. I finally checked up on what they actually DID and found out they had done very little. Just the superfisicial stuff like posting all the content I supplied. They really had not done any link building or social media marketing.
That was a year ago, and in the past year, by reading your stuff Nick, I am please to say I have managed to triple the traffic, improve the sales funnel and actually start making some money.
Of course when you unknowingly hire schmucks, it doesn’t matter what approach they SAY they will take. If I had paid them based on results, I would have paid about $2,000, not $12,500.
Thanks for all your honest and expert advice.
Lorraine Grula
Does anyone perform performance based SEO?
Hi Mary – Thanks for reading and your comment, I will send you an email to see if I can help you with your SEO efforts.
Hi Lorraine – Thanks for being such a loyal reader! Unfortunately, many companies get burned by hiring SEO service providers that don’t actually generate a good return. I think the key is to really spend some time researching and finding the best SEO services firm or consultant that can truly help and is a good fit.
Hi Daniel – In my experience performance based SEO services don’t really work that well. Would you take on a client that hires you to help with accounting work on a performance basis? (I took a look at your site)…thanks for reading
Pricing SEO engagements requires research. Period.
I work at a large agency where our business development folks are trained in the nuances of SEO and leverage our SEO department on prospect meetings to ensure we have all the information we need before we prepare a competitive, realistic and viable proposal.
Educating clients is a large part of my team’s responsibility and is an integral part of our process. Education isn’t just an altruistic exercise on our part. When our clients understand the goals, efforts, opportunities, process, pitfalls, tactics and research behind our Best Practices, it makes it that much easier to justify implementation resources as well as anticipate, recognize and wait patiently for the positive results they obtain.
To address the other SEO as PPC model noted above, ROI on SEO is tough to sell upfront as it’s obviously not as clear cut and scheduled as PPC spend / ROI. Clients have differing goals on how “success” is defined, so a large part of our upfront work and first few steps of engagement is making sure the success metrics are clearly defined, understood and integrated, to drive strategy and reporting.
“Does anyone perform performance based SEO?”
It isn’t always viable, but certainly some of our revenue is derived from performance-based metrics. In fact, with some client it’s the only way they’ll do business (more opportunity for us!)
Hi Grant – Thanks for your comments.
I agree with you, client education is so very important, I always educate clients before and during the on site and off site seo process…
To address your thought about performance based SEO, I could see including a small part of the fee as a performance basis in addition to covering the hours of work being put in…as with many things in our industry there are people who abuse certain things (such as performance SEO) and make it tough for the rest of us to start new client relationships…
Anyway, thanks again for your comments!
Hi, I really enjoy these newsletters. I have been reading them for a while, but never really left a comment. These topics are very useful for a lot of people, I they are very helpful for me.
Keep it up.
Regards
Rod
Per phrase charges don’t make sense as you can never quite predict the number of phrases and combinations typed in by SE users.
Hi Rod,
Thanks for reading the Brick Marketing SEO newsletter and our blog…I look forward to bringing you great useful information!
Hi DejanSEO,
I agree with you…per keyword phrase is so tough and it always forces clients to put all of their “eggs” or keyword in several baskets and not really optimize pages of their entire website to maximize their on site SEO…
The most difficult part of SEO is getting you client to agree on expectations and realizer that SEO is not just some magic formula. Involve your client up front and have them complete a detailed profile of their target market, otherwise you will them traffic, but no bottom line results. I would rather bring my clients 10 more good potentials a month than 1000 visitors who bounce on the landing page.
Hi Galen,
I agree it is more important to get 10 quality leads, sales, etc. that bring a good return rather than a 1000 non-qualified visitors…
Great article, Nick.
I stumbled upon it while doing some research on rates, etc. for my new SEO, Copywriting and Online Marketing company.
Having had a few clients by now, I completely agree with what you are saying. I always try to deliver based on what they are comfortable and happy with (hourly, consulting, per-project), but I never ever mention amounts until I have given them and their site a complete and thorough investigation.
I have never understood the SEO firms that provide a dollar amount for complete “SEO packages” while trying to guarantee first page results. They waste too much time inserting asterisks and creating small print at the bottom of their pricing pages. Bad business.
But, good for the honest, hard-working and customer-centered SEOs!
Hi Brian,
Thanks for reading and your comment! Good luck with the launch of your new SEO company!
I paid $10,000 and didn’t get past page 11 for my site! I paid someone else $500 and I am currently on page 2(only 20 days later)
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for reading and your comment.
Since SEO in a long term strategy and process, it could very well be that the efforts of the first firm (that you paid $10,000) over a period of time finally paid off. Since I don’t have all of your details, I have no way of really saying.
I have had SEO clients that I have optimized their websites and then start link building, only to have the link building canceled after a few months because the clients lack of patience and understanding that SEO is indeed a long term strategy. Then a few months after they had stopped our SEO link building service their site is positioned nicely…too bad clients can stick around (some of them) long enough so we can take the credit and help them build it even further.