What does SEO cost?
There should be no secrets here, you hire my time, you get a plan of what that looks like. But hiring a consultant means you’re paying for fast tracked EXPERTISE.
You’re hiring someone who can integrate with your business instantly, understand your issues without lengthy onboarding and can share their years of experience without trials or training.
But there’s no one fixed fee as different factors affect the scale of your project, like:
How many pages your site has
How competitive your niche is
How healthy your current site is
What resource is available
Pricing a project my way
I want to offer some transparency here, so we have a clear and concise understanding of our pricing points. I start off with a basic retainer each month that matches the salary expectation of a mid-level SEO manager.
BUT – I have director level experience (senior-level) and have been the head of department on more than one occasion.
- I’m also a mid-level programmer – I can talk to tech
- Experienced project leader – I can lead 360°
- 10yr+ accomplished SEO expert
- Conference presenter and trusted by SEO peers
I’m a multi-disciplined digital expert, you benefit from advanced, holistic knowledge and technical leadership at the cost of an average SEO manager.
You get what you pay for
If you’re still not sure, there’s a simple assessment you can perform yourself in order to cost up a project. On average it collectively takes around 1-2 days to fully audit, document and brief in any edits or updates per single key page on a website.
A key page is where you expect a transaction of any kind to take place. So a CTA click, a product purchase, a lead gen form, an article engagement etc.
Typically that means you’ve covered the following
- Full tech audit
- Rank analysis
- Search intent matching (relevancy)
- Query analysis
- Internal link audit
- Refinement brief
- New content brief
- Plus meetings & emails!
This is whilst performing assessments on the Google search listings you want to be visible in and the competitors that occupy the space you want to grow into. For that you need data, tools, time and the knowledge to identify solutions to any issues.
Now, it doesn’t take exactly 2 days to sit and assess 1 page. SEO’s have developed methods to scale their analysis and process multiple pages at a time.
But eventually, we have to stop and create a detailed plan, where we present the page problems, document the solutions and communicate that to your team.
If your competitors are years ahead of you, you’re going to need to be realistic and ambitious about your commitment to beating them. So don’t assume these things get done in a matter of days.
Website SEO is like a buildings and maintenance contract. If you only service your maintenance contract for 1 month and it fails six months later – what else did you except?
How long does it take?
By Google’s own admission it sometimes takes them up to 6-12 months to refactor the millions of results that are listed in the searches you want to be present in. So each audited page should have a framework of assessment that tracks progress over that minimum 6 months period, allowing for a further refinement process.
If you make an edit, or create a new page, there are millions of listed URLs in that space already and Google doesn’t just bump them all out of the way to accommodate your new content. It has to refactor the rankings over time taking into account the hundreds of keywords that you likely rank for with that page and the millions of other pages listed on those keywords.
So if you value organic search as a channel and see it’s potential, you’ll know how important it is to build pages that are tailored towards Googles ranking signals. Cost your project per page yourself and you’ll understand the need to be realistic with your budget. Its not a birds eye approach, its hands on, page to page analysis with lots of data, enterprise tools and time dependent.