How To Choose Pricing
When setting your online marketing budget, determining appropriate SEO pricing for your business is no easy task.
When a business decides to hire an SEO company, it is often done to fill a void in your business’ skills or expertise. It’s an important decision to get right as the growth of your business can be dependent on the success of the search marketing campaign. Thus, with no in-house experts to help you evaluate potential companies, and the somewhat intimidating vernacular of SEO, how can a business begin to understand what SEO services they need? More importantly, how does one gauge the value and costs of those services to determine what kind of budget to allocate to SEO services?
SEO rates can be all over the place, so let's dive into what to look for.
SEO Pricing Models - What To Expect
Whether you hire an inexpensive SEO consultant from a foreign country Like India,Pakistan or Philippians) or a nationally-recognized SEO agency, there are a few different types of pricing models you can expect to see offered:
SEO Monthly Plan Pricing
Many SEO companies will offer monthly or annual contracts that revolve around a monthly calendar. At Outer Box, we create our strategies several months in advance and reflect on our work, results, and progress on at least a monthly basis. A two-way street of communication between the SEO company and client is crucial to achieving the very best results possible. It is important to note that while we offer monthly plans, we do not offer one-size-fits all SEO monthly packages, since that kind of approach to SEO isn’t the most effective. Many monthly packages offered by other companies will include a set number and type of services, such as articles written, backlinks gained, and pages optimized. These types of “turnkey” packages are often sold by inferior SEO agencies who are more concerned with delivering a specified amount of tangible work each month than producing results.
Beware of any companies promising to build a specified amount of backlinks per month, especially since the quality and relevancy of backlinks pointing to your website is significantly more important than the quantity. While our planned tasks and SEO activities are scheduled on a monthly basis for organization and streamlining workflow, our strategies are not confined by these types of “pre-assembled” monthly packages. Our SEO services are instead customized so that we are always working on what we know will deliver the greatest ROI.
Pricing SEO by Hourly Rate
SEO hourly rates mostly fall in the $50-250 per hour range. If your business is making only a few hundred dollars per month in online revenue, don’t expect to see a fast turnaround on $1,000 per month of SEO spend. If you are looking to pay for SEO by the hour, it may be wise to hire a consultant or hire an agency to perform an SEO audit and then pay an hourly rate for specific SEO services as needed. However, if you do need those types of immediate results with a website with very little existing exposure, you likely would benefit by supplementing your SEO efforts with paid advertising, such as a Google Ads Campaign to begin with. Don’t fret; Urban FIrstlook also offers some of the nation’s leading AdWords Management Services so talk with us about how we can help your campaign be as successful as possible.
How Much Does SEO Cost?
In the spirit of transparency, I would like to share a real-world example. Keyword research indicates that an average of 500 people search the exact query “how much does SEO cost” in Google each month. That’s part of the reason we decided to write this article! This question is a considerable source of confusion, especially for those early in the researching stages. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.
The short answer is that SEO pricing ranges anywhere from $50 per hour to over $250 per hour depending on the SEO agency you hire. The SEO-famous Neil Patel ostensibly charges up to $5,000 just for an initial hour-long consultation. All of that is not to say that your neighbor’s daughter down the street who is “good with computers” won’t offer to do it for $200 a month, and heck, she might even know what she’s doing! We’re also not saying that Neil Patel might not be worth that $5,000 price (spoiler alert: if you’re not a Fortune 500 company, he most likely isn’t).
No matter who you ultimately trust to provide SEO services for your business, how much SEO ultimately costs depends on many variables, including:
What Affects The Cost of SEO?
- SEO Skill Set & Expertise
- Location Determines Pricing
- Competency in Your Target Audience’s Language
- Level of Marketing Expertise in Your Niche
SEO Services Pricing & General Costs
If you are ready to hire an SEO company, or even just an SEO consultant to perform specific SEO services, some SEO companies do offer á la carte services or at least may be willing to tailor their monthly plans to meet your needs. At Urban Firstlook, we offer monthly packages uniquely customized to each client’s needs and industry. We base our strategy and recommended financial investment on what we know will move the needle the fastest – but we are also sure to account for any specific client needs or requests within those monthly strategies.
Once a customized strategy and monthly cost is recommended, we resolve to make your money work as hard as planned
If we determine that any specific client requests are of lesser “SEO priority” than our recommended SEO strategies and planned tasks, we communicate that openly. We will still honor a client’s requests, but there may a separate cost. This way, we ensure that we deliver the results the client expects while still meeting any and all special requests.
In fact, this complete transparency extends far beyond pricing and is one of the lesser-known advantages of working with Urban First Look.
How Can You Tell If SEO Costs Are Worth It?
Generally speaking, you do get what you pay for with SEO, but there is a certain amount of vetting one needs to do before choosing an SEO company. Here are some tips on that:
- Look for proven results. Look for case studies and ask the companies you’re considering to give some real examples of their success. If they struggle or hesitate to provide you with any success stories, odds are they haven’t had much success
- Listen to past clients. Read reviews both on their site and on 3rd party websites. Keep in mind that even the best companies (SEO and otherwise) will always have a few negative reviews, so take those mostly with a grain of salt. Instead, look for overarching trends, and if you see any recurring red flags, you should likely move on.
- Talk with the team directly. Ask to get on a call with the actual employees that would be managing your SEO account or to speak to whoever oversees the SEO department. It’s not unreasonable for you to want to know a little bit more about the people you’ll be paying to work on your website and what strategies they might be implementing to improve your search results, especially when going with a more legitimate agency.
- Learn to spot a shady strategy. Read up about “black-hat SEO” and be sure that any of the strategies the salespeople discuss with you don’t seem to violate any of Google’s guidelines. At Urban First Look, we are a strictly white-hat SEO company, which means we work within the rules of Google to ensure your site is never penalized as a result of the work we do. That would be entirely counterproductive!
- Try a few and compare. Consider purchasing standalone Seo Audit Services from several companies, and then compare the findings of those audits. You may pay a little extra at the get-go, but you’ll have a better chance of choosing the best company. After selecting an SEO company to work with, share those findings with your new SEO company to ensure any valuable discoveries you paid for are leveraged accordingly