3 Main Factors Determining SEO Cost
While we have mentioned that calculating the price of an SEO effort will involve many different variables and factors, there are three main factors to consider:- Your Current Situation
- Your Goals
- Time
- The amount of links we will need to get into the first page. At least, an approximation of it
- How much work is needed, and whether you will need extra manpower
- Do you need to invest on PPC ads? If so, you can roughly calculate the cost. This guide by wordstream might help you.
- Since the objective is ‘as soon as possible’, what is the rough timeline to achieve this goal
Understanding SEO Quality
Well, aren’t there affordable SEO agencies offering great results? Why can’t we use them to lower our SEO cost?Questions like these always arise, and so it is very important to first understand that there is no secret strategy or holy grail tacic of SEO, period. If an agency is telling you otherwise, it is actually a major red flag that they are a scam.So, while quality is another major factor in determining SEO cost, we should understand that it is not about method or tactic. Most SEO agencies and practitioners will, and should rely on basically the same tactics that are essentially:- Publish high-quality, relevant contents that are engaging for human audiences while also properly targeting the keyword(s)
- Promote those contents with various methods like influencer marketing, social media marketing, etc. with the goal to:
- Get more backlinks
The Average SEO Cost
Although, as we have mentioned, there are many different variables than can alter your cost, here is a benchmark based on our experience.- $75-$200 a month for very low competition keywords (basically, you have no competition here)
- $300-400 a month for a small business targeting keywords with medium difficulty
- $400-600 a month for a more competitive, mid-range SEO
- $600-1,500 a month for nationwide small business SEO or small business targeting competitive keywords
- $1,500-$2,500 a month for competitive industries targeting high-quality keywords
- $2,500 a month and above for high-end businesses, such as nationwide companies in a competitive industry, multi-location businesses and multinational companies
The Triangle of SEO Pricing
BowlerHat published a really interesting article about SEO’s project management triangle. Good, fast, or cheap, or as we’ll say it: quality, time or cost: you can only get two from the available three.- If the quality is good and it is affordable, it will take a long time before you see any results.
- If it’s fast and the quality is good, it will be expensive.
- Last but not least, if it is both affordable and fast, you will need to question the quality