How much does SEO costs?
The cost of SEO will largely depend on the competition in your industry. A plumber in a small town, for example, will likely only need to spend a few hundred dollars per month to rank. This is in contrast to law firms in downtown Manhattan which may spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on SEO. To see results, you can expect to pay the following monthly amounts:
$200-$1000 in a small town $1000-$3000 in a decent-sized city with decent competition $10000 or more in a national SEO campaign or for very competitive niches
Please contact us for a SEO audit for a more accurate quote based on your requirements.
Why does it cost so much? People are promising me results for much less.
SEO actually includes a lot of work. Imagine you hire someone to manage your website, create content and do outreach to get you links. How much would that cost? Also be aware that the competition in your local markets may be paying thousands of dollars a month. How is it possible that you can outrank them while spending a minor fraction of that?
There are sometimes people promising to improve your ranking using some sort of “black hat” technique with a glitch in Google’s algorithms. Most of these are scams. You are pretty much trying to outsmart Google’s AI, which is a failing strategy. Google’s search engine is Google’s bread and butter. They are in the business to give their customers (internet users) the best results in order to sell ads, and having a bunch of trash sites that have “gamed” the system at the top is working against what they are trying to achieve. Google will penalize such websites eventually. Even if you tried one of these techniques and it was extremely successful. You will probably have to invest heavily to expand your business only to have Google knock you down when they discover it and put a red flag on your business website that will harm its results for a long time.
What are my alternatives to hiring a digital marketing Agency?
You have 2 alternatives if you want to pursue digital marketing:
1. Hire an amazingly talented marketing genius or create a team of people who understand SEO, web design, and content creation. Even at minimum wage, you can do the math on how much you will have to spend per month.
2. Do it yourself. While not extremely difficult to learn, you will have to spend hours learning everything, which is probably accomplishable if this is something that is interesting to you. Then, you will have to do the time-consuming work of making an online presence and website upkeep. Time is money. Every hour working on this is another hour you are not working on your most productive tasks for your business. You will not be able to work on your business if you are bogged down with this.
The Correct way to think about SEO services and pricing.
Understand that being highly ranked in Google is really profitable to any business. However, there are only 10 spots on the top spot of Google. If you are in a very profitable niche, then it is likely that your competition is also spending a lot of money on SEO. While this may seem daunting at first, it is also liberating in knowing that most people like to shop around and will likely click on a lot of different results.
There may be opportunities for very profitable growth with little investment. There are situations with different markets and industries where your competition is not investing much or is doing something incorrectly. The best way to see if there are any SEO opportunities in your local area is to contact us for a SEO audit. The problem is, however, even if you were to find a great opportunity, if you let your guard down, other people will come into the space and you will be outranked pretty easily. Therefore a monthly investment in SEO would be a worthy investment.