We live in a price centric world where I can shop and get pricing from a dozen places in mere minutes. So, it’s no wonder that people have gotten to the point where the cheapest wins a lot of the times but when it comes to having search engine optimization or internet marketing period is a cheap marketing solution really the best idea?
That is what I want to talk about today. Sometimes cheap can lead to being more costly! I also want to cover what goes into doing SEO so that business owners and decision makers can get a better understanding of the man hours it takes to do the minimum that is required.
I also want to cover how every project is different and every industry is different. That your
Can You Get Good SEO For $295 A Month & Why Am I Talking About It?
What got me started on this is really two things constant bombardment of my own email mailbox as well as those of my clients offering too good to be true SEO deals! The other would be a Facebook ad that I keep coming across that says don’t overpay for SEO! We can do your SEO for $295 a month!
Let’s talk about why a cheap SEO deal like this are not likely to be the real deal.
I will cover the basics of a good SEO plan of any sort here. We’re going to cover two scenarios one is local SEO the other is a National SEO plan.
Basic Components Of A Solid Search Engine Optimization Package
A Local plan that is comprehensive will consist of onsite optimization which will consist of:
- Optimization of the web site by adding service area pages and at least some content depending on the competition and how competitive your market is.
- Building or earning quality links to the website. You earn links by having quality information on your site that makes you a resource or by having some sort of tool that may help users. There are other ways but those are the basics. Not only does your content have to written it also has to be optimized so search engines like Google and Bing in order to get some visibility.
- You will need to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing which will consist of optimizing the listing as well as adding citations and finding ways to solicit legitimate reviews from your clients as well as posting on the GMB itself for best results. So, more content that is meaningful needs to be created.
- Some Social Media is also a good idea to incorporate into your campaign which can be as basic as just posting your good google reviews to your channels to real interaction.
So roughly just looking at the basics of doing this how many hours do you think just this part will take?
Depending on how much content and how many links are needed to get you ranking on terms you want to rank on this part alone can easily be a 20-30hour project depending where you are located and what the industry is. It could take more.
So just for this part at $295 price for your local internet marketing doing SEO you would pay just rounding it all up $10 an hour. The guy at Target makes more than an internet marketing expert at a starting pay of $13 an hour. This is where this does not add up! Once you understand the hours involved.
Even the most basic of local seo campaigns are going to require 10 to 15 hours of work if you leave of the content creation component and just do a onetime optimization of the company website and focus on optimizing your GMB only a realistic lowest possible price is going to be much higher than the $295.
Let’s Look at the basics of a national seo campaign
- Onsite Optimization is going to be must which will involve optimizing the whole web site and making sure you have an SEO Friendly Website to work with.
- Technical SEO which is making sure that the site is coded properly and things like caching and image optimization, minified CSS and such are all in place to make it load as fast as possible without any errors.
- Content Creation is a big thing that will have to be done and is costly. It’s not just good enough to throw up any content, it needs to be informative, useful and engaging so you will need a writer that is a native speaker and understands the industry they are writing for.
- Link Building is going to be your next task that has to be done which will also somewhat rely on the quality of your content as well as active outreach to get you guest post and on authoritative websites to get them to link to your site.
So that is just the basics that pretty much every viable successful SEO campaign needs to rank on any competitive search terms organically. The amount that is needed will depend on how competitive the industry is. On average a national seo campaign can consist of as little as 40 hours to 60 or more hours a month all depending on what is needed. Again $295 a month won’t even scratch the surface of what the cost will be for someone to do a reasonable job.
Now I am not saying you cannot find search engine optimization services that are cheap, you can just like you can find a shade tree mechanic to wrench on your car. However, you will find that you get what you pay for and sometimes all that will happen is they will take your money until you’re sick of them!
Realistic SEO Pricing For Local & National SEO Services
Establishing the right price to pay for SEO is somewhat tricky because it truly varies by the needs of each project as well as how competitive the space is.
I am going to do my best to give you some pricing guidelines that are reasonable but will vary depending on the project. While you can get much cheaper SEO done overseas in India or somewhere there abouts in all my years of SEO I have yet to see very many of those do good SEO that will get a client’s marketing where they want it to be.
Here are some basic pricing guidelines that are what you can expect for search engine optimization from a company based in the USA.
Mostly what you will find with search engine optimization is that the more money you put into your campaign the more resources to get you ranking can be utilized and the faster you will get results!
I hope this sheds some light of what search engine marketing work really cost when you want good results that are sustainable!
Realistic SEO Pricing Chart
- Local SEO Google My Business Optimization Only – For just GMB optimization which will touch a little on also doing basic optimization on your site $595 to $795 a month.
- For Local SEO Of GMB & Website – Having your GMB as well as your site optimized and adding content on a regular basis to your website and working on getting you more links your minimum starting point should be around $1500 to as high as 10K+a month. I know this looks like a big gap, but this is where pricing really depends on the Industry and your location. For example doing local SEO for lawyers in Houston can get very expensive depending on your field of law but your base starting price would generally double and you would start at $3K a month. This would be for highly competitive fields of law like a personal injury attorney for example. It all boils down to what the competition is spending which directly translates into the amount of work that they are putting into their own websites to rank.
- For National SEO Projects – Depending on the industry you can expect to pay from as little as $1500 – 3K a month. Aggressive campaigns in very competitive industries can easily run $10K – $20K a Month.
