SEO Pricing Definition

 

SEO prices are subjective in the industry and will vary depending upon the SEO agency providing the service.  SEO services pricing more commonly depends in part on the amount of keywords a website is targeting, the difficulty of those keywords, the amount of competition proactively optimizing for those keywords and the geographical area the website wishes to target.  Other pricing structures may be based on SEO pricing packages which provide certain levels of service, certain amounts of keywords, geo-targets, and the quantity of websites the client wishes to have optimized.  SEO package pricing varies also by region and by vendor as some enterprise level SEO companies may offer rates and packages in the thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars per month while other smaller, newer or more localized SEO firms, consultants or “specialists” may offer SEO pricing in the hundreds of dollars per month range.

Many companies today also offer an array of pricing models that depend on performance such as pay-per-lead or a structured payment plan that allows the client to pay less upfront but more than they would have should certain milestones be reached.  Many SEO providers also offer SEO guarantees that state that if the service provider does not reach their milestones that they’ll continue to work at reduced rates or even for free.  Such “free” deals or “SEO guarantees” can be sketchy as the vendor may just sideline the client’s work for paying customers while merely providing them with glossy reports and vastly under-rated service.  It is best to establish a true budget for SEO and to pay that to a qualified provider.  Do you research on the company and their clients and definitely ask for examples of their successes. 

SEO pricing structures and packages should also be compared to the potential return on the investment so that it is worth the expenditure.  This can be done by determining the potential amount of a conversion (e.g. a sale, subscription, ad view, etc) and the quantity of traffic required to provide enough sales based on your websites conversion rate.  If you sell a product for $50 and your profit is 50% of that amount then you’ll need to generate $25 to simply break even.  If you convert at the average of 2% of overall traffic then you’ll need to generate 50 visitors to your website to break even.  In order to generate profit or increase ones profit one can either increase the amount of traffic; increase the websites conversion rate or a combination of the two.    If you’re spending $1,000 per month to have your website optimized then you’ll be required to generate an additional 500 visitors per month to simply break even.  We refer to “additional” traffic because the SEO agency shouldn’t count your existing traffic in their goals.  You’re hiring them to increase traffic as your costs (i.e. what you’re paying for their services) have increased.

We believe that billing based on keywords alone is not the correct way to approach a campaign or billing.  As Google is the primary Search Engine and their overall algorithm, named Hummingbird, relies on topics and the semantic context of the keywords is inherent in the topics, it should be topics which are targeted and charged for. 

For more information on our SEO Pricing and SEO Packages please feel free to contact us.