What is the true price of SEO?

How much SEO services cost? This is the question I'm asked by all my clients, friends and even family.

Everyone wants to put a price on SEO like it was some kind of finite one-time service. For PPC campaigns things can be fairly easy, you pay a certain amount of money for every click you get, it is easy, people understand the concept, for every visit they get a certain payment needs to be made. When we are talking about SEO things get complicated and it may probably the hardest activity to measure online.

So what does the average business owner that wants to invest in SEO needs to know?

1. Getting top positions in a search result on a national level is not the same as getting top ranks for a local keyword and local results. This, of course, will mean different costs. You also need to be realistic about the potential you have for the keyword you want to rank. If you have your doubts about SEO start with something small, try ranking for long tail national keywords first or local based keywords. Once you pay for such results you can figure out how much SEO is going to cost for more popular keywords.

2. Having a new website with a new domain can be a pain and it usually means you need to invest both first-time on-page optimizations but also off-page SEO once the on-page SEO part is implemented. So the initial SEO costs involving new websites can be slightly bigger because it involves the basic on-page implementation that you only do once. Like making sure the headings are SEO friendly site-wide as well as having a sitemap.XML file, a robots.txt file, etc.

3. Set some clear achievable goals. You can't ask your SEO company to rank you for "women shoes" on with a new website in just 1 month. You need to set some realistic goals first and foremost but also figure out how big of a budget you are willing to spend on SEO, because the truth is, depending on your niche, there will be always something to rank for and in essence this means they may be no limit on how much you can spend on SEO. Keep in mind SEO takes a time to implement and to get results, as your SEO for an estimation on your main goals and figure out if you have the budget to complete the campaign.

4. On-page SEO is a must but not all of your pages will need backlinks and authority. Together with your SEO specialist figure out which are the best pages to increase authority on. If you have 10k product pages it would be totally crazy to build backlinks for each and every product page. Concentrate the link building efforts on the listing pages or on special SEO landing pages.

5. The more pages you have the more SEO will cost. If you have really big websites, targeting a very developed niche that has loads of popular keywords expect your SEO to cost quite a lot. As I said, you don't need to optimize everything at the same level but you will definitely pay more for SEO than the guys that haves a 10 pages websites.

6. Quality costs. If you want to settle for a mediocre SEO company that does the exact same things they did 5 years ago, you can't really expect top results. But if you are ready to pay quality SEOs that use the latest techniques as well as the best available technologies you will need to dig deeper into your pocket.

So how much can SEO cost exactly?

At least for my client's contracts can vary from 200 bucks per month (the minimum package I'm willing to work for) to 2500 per month which is the maximum we currently have. But 2500 is nothing with some big SEO contracts other companies have into place. Big websites that need a lot of work done can sign contracts over 25k per month.