How much does SEO cost?

Not all SEO companies are equal and very often the size of the company will strongly influence how their pricing structure is determined.

The Freelancer

This is at the cheaper end of the price range for seo. Normally a freelancer will work on multiple small projects doing everything themselves in the aim of providing a ‘full service’. Good freelance SEO’s usually become successful agency owners so this route has it’s caveats but can work well for small local companies seeking to be visible in local search results. This is clearly budget friendly for a small business with rates starting at £35 and upwards for even the cheapest semi competent freelancer. Though freelancer seo rates are often lower unless you can measure their work output and get detailed reports this can be a costly route to take for little benefit.

Freelancer SEO pricing

Pricing : Usually a freelancer seo hourly rate starts from £35 per hour or lower cost monthly packages from around 10 hours or £350 per month.

Advantages: Perfect for smaller companies or businesses with a tight budget who want to take their first digital steps. A good freelancer can usually get the basics in place and begin a digital marketing campaign for you. It also gives the business owner direct contact with the person doing the work which can be a plus point.

Disadvantages: The old adage ‘buy cheap buy twice’ is very much applicable to SEO services and digital marketing. If things are done wrong, particularly using nefarious means to try and inflate short term results; untold damage can be done to a companies digital presence, that can be far more expensive to undo than having it done right in the first place. In many cases now it is impossible to recover websites or brands that have had black hat seo work done on them by someone with no accountability or thought for the businesses future.

Low spend of £350 per month doesn’t buy enough skills, resources or time to deliver great results, so don’t expect a miracle.

Inevitably a freelancer will not be able to afford the multiple professional cloud based and software SEO packages that a proper agency will be able to fund (some of these can run upwards of £1500 a month!), this is a significant disadvantage before the freelancer even starts. Additionally, a freelancer does not have any accountability (eg/ a guy or girl in a bedroom or home office won’t have insurance or a business reputation to protect) and this can mean major problems if things go sour in the working relationship.

Lastly, a single person cannot hope to cover all the bases that a full digital marketing campaign needs to be involved in; hence their suitability for small business, small goals work.

Warnings: We would strongly avoid outsourcing anything to sites like fiverr or upwork or using cheap foreign freelancers from this sort of site. We have had numerous problem sites through the door that have been ‘worked on’ by freelancers from these sites and it can easily lead to google penalties or just plain leave your web presence far worse off than before you engaged them. Accountability is non existent when using a remote sourced freelancer so if you want to take this route, we would advise to use someone UK based and reputable. Yes, it will cost more but how much do you value your business at?!

The Small SEO Agency

A small SEO agency would usually consist of between 1 and 10 individuals including support staff. Generally they will handle multiple smaller SME campaigns and by definition will be aiming at a small amount of keywords within an SEO campaign. A good quality small seo agency will also be hot on addressing technical on page SEO issues, undertake all levels of link building, strategic planning, and content creation. Many small agencies including ourselves have remote staff to keep overheads down and ensure we can offer competitive pricing.

Small SEO Agency Pricing

Pricing: Usually an hourly rate starting from £60 per hour or monthly retainer packages ranging from £500-£2000 on average.

Advantages: Due to size constraints a small seo agency is often a more specialist agency which is great. You dont want an agency that does everything (often badly). They will be a small team with ideally a sharp focus on what they can do and what they can’t do. They will typically be fast in responding to client needs and have a shared pool of knowledge and skills that will be utilised within projects.

Disadvantages: if they are a single (SEO only) or limited channel agency  they won’t always have the broader knowledge of how the different digital channels integrate and benefit each other. There is without doubt some very competent agencies at this level (like us!) but when working with a small budget there can often be a disparity between client expectations and budget limits. Know what you are going to get from a small SEO agency before signing up for anything. Make sure that your budget is realistic when applied to the competitiveness of the market you are competing in.

The Mid Size SEO agency

Many mid sized agencies offer a multi channel approach to their digital marketing and will have teams covering different disciplines of search marketing.

There is a larger investment in terms of training and software or cloud based tools, which as a result means the level of knowledge and insights from this will be significantly more when companies to the average smaller agency or freelancer (certainly against a freelancer who is outpriced for many critical tools right from the outset).

Very strategic in their project planning while remaining flexible in their pricing and approach, would be a key facet of a good mid size agency.

Medium Size SEO agency pricing

Pricing: Monthly retainers or contracts based on average day rate/hourly rates or spread over project cost. Extras are billed on top as hourly rate. Day rates from £500 per day with a minimum monthly spend of £2000 and upwards. Sometimes the medium size agency will do a project cost pricing plus extras.

Advantages: A mid size agency will again have a larger team and usually different team specialities. This bring a cohesive complete digital marketing solution that is needed to take on bigger brand projects or highly competitive industries. They have more professional tools at their disposal, more complexity in the information they can collect and analyse and are more strategic in their approach to a project, it’s variables and deliverables and outcomes. Measuring the success of a mid size SEO agency project is done as regards the increase in brand value, awareness and return on investment over and above purely keyword based rankings.

Disadvantages: Having a larger team will usually mean that not all people on the team are equally qualified or experienced. There will inevitably be some inexperienced or trainee staff on the project and you are reliant on the agencies more senior staff to monitor and manage these staff effectively to ensure your project is safe from any potential mistakes.

Also you will be paying more than you would for a smaller agency as the mid size agency will have larger premises, more overheads and more staff to pay.

 

The Large SEO Agency

 A very strategic and segmented approach that puts the client at the centre of everything. Generally large agencies will be used to working with Blue Chips and other demanding medium sized and large companies or PLC’s , who demand the maximum possible resources and are not too concerned about the cost. Winning at all costs is a fundamental strategic outcome for large SEO agencies if they wish to be successful. The competition is hot and the marketplace fierce (yes, the small and medium agencies are competing in the same arena too, just usually with slightly smaller brands).

Using the latest and greatest cutting edge tools, software and usually with very posh ‘creative’ style offices you would expect a large agency to be using all manner of audience profiling, heavyweight content marketing, big social marketing teams and connections (using the likes of socialchain.com),  user needs analysis, all manner of UX professionals, a solid web development team, Organic Search staff, Google specialists (analytics, Google Ads, local search etc) and more.

The Large SEO agency will live by Key Performance Indicators and that is how they will measure your projects success along with Return on Investment.

Large SEO Agency Pricing

Pricing: Monthly retainer or monthly contract pricing (plus extras) or a fixed project cost in some instances.

Price range: Starting at £10,000 month and upwards or on a project cost basis (both plus extras)

Advantages: Often attract the “top talent” in terms of developers, managers, data science experts, marketers and creatives. For these roles the experience and portfolio requirements are very high among more senior staff (to land the job in the first place). The Large SEO agency has a client base that will make smaller agencies very jealous; usually because they have built up a reputation for delivering results and have contacts in all the right places (certainly to reach the status of large agency)

Disadvantages: Very expensive which rules out a lot of companies being their clients, but then they don’t want the ‘smaller fish’ as their USP comes from being big scale, big price.

Do these gargantuan agencies deliver value above that which a smaller seo agency can provide? It depends on the project but in many cases, it is unlikely to be the case. With a big budget to work with a very sharp small/medium size agency can white label work out to their contact’s in the industry to cover bases they can’t cover fully in house (yes we can do this!).  The top talent pool isn’t by any means all at the big agencies; in fact, some of them left to setup their own agencies!

How exactly does an SEO company or digital marketing agency come up with their pricing model? What goes into the pricing proposal they send you?

SEO is a very confusing and technical industry that gets more complex almost by the month with hundreds of different factors at play. For those uninitiated with digital marketing it can be hard to discern what they actually need and what they will be getting.

Putting a proposal together for an agency is a skill set in itself, here are some of the factors to be aware of when you are thinking of signing up for a seo analysis or a proposal.

Your companies current situation and goals

The actual cost of SEO is effectively a financial investment that improves your business from where you are, to where you want to be. The vast majority of initial or basic SEO proposals are an analysis of your current organic rankings, your web presence and website, your companies link profile, social media activity and status; and on a more local level , citations and local relevance. There is of course a myriad of other factors that need analysing, for example your budget is important to know, as is the industry or niche within which you operate. These two factors need to be aligned in terms of realistic achievable goals.

Analysing the competition vs available budget

For example; a finance company starting out with a 10 year old website and no social presence wanting to rank for high traffic national finance terms would require a big budget, whereas a local tradesman with a website that ranked on page 2 for some relevant local searches but wanted to make to actually being seen on page 1, would require a smaller budget.

Additionally, the highly competitive markets will require a big budget over a longer durations vs low competition markets needing a lower budget over potentially a shorter time period.

Be under no illusion though; a proper SEO campaign is not something that is ever really ‘finished’. Granted, the main bulk of the work may be done over the first 6 – 12 months but websites and SEO strategies constantly need attention and improving with ongoing work to be effective in competitive marketplaces (and even in less competitive ones.). At the end of the day, if the competition are improving their site and digital profile all the time, you need to be doing the same to not get left behind.

Your companies needs

How much your SEO costs really depends on your needs. Some companies are not wanting a long term contract to have their SEO done by a professional agency. Quite often, here at SEO Leaders we get asked to use our specialist skills in certain areas of SEO, for example a backlink cleanup / backlink detox or negative seo repair service; comprehensive SEO audits; or the use of our awesome Google penalty recovery service.

Large companies very often have an in house SEO department, particularly online based big businesses. Very often this type of company may seek help from the top tier seo agencies for help with specific areas of their work. For example they may want help in onpage technical SEO from people who do that day in day out (we do!) where as smaller companies are generally looking for an all in one SEO solution as it’s cheaper to outsource than to pay staff salaries. Particularly when you need such a talent and knowledge base to offer a comprehensively effective service like some of the best mid size agencies. We are biased but we would certainly say that SEO Leaders fit’s into that category without a doubt!

How fast do you need the work?

 It’s not only what work you need doing that affects the price, but how urgently you need it doing. Most successful agencies will have their talented teams timeslots filled for months ahead, often well over 6 months ahead. If a project is ‘please drop everything and help us’ urgent, this will naturally be reflected in the price.

SEO Account Manager?

 In the big SEO agencies there is normally an account manager hierarchy and the cost of the project will increase or decrease depending on the credentials and experience of the account manager you want to manage your project. This is reasonable; after all, you wouldn’t expect to pay a junior barrister the same as a 25 year experienced QC to represent you in court, would you?