What is the average pricing local SEO companies provide?

This article is designed to answer one of the most common in the digital world question - “How much does local SEO cost?” However, I suppose this question should sound like “What is the primary value of local optimization services?” To answer this question, we need to understand how local SEO works, what benefits it delivers, and how your local SEO company can affect your future business development. SEO is not always easy to measure as many marketing activities may impact organic search traffic. 

As a rule, the cost of SEO services depends on the potential rewards. Fortunately, a ranking of the locally oriented keywords will cost you less than national or global optimization. However, even on a local level, there can be massive variability concerning the number of locations you want to optimize, the area you want to expand your business power (big city, small town, village, neighborhood, micro-area), and the goals you set for your optimization team. All of these factors influence the price of SEO for your unique situation. 

Among the primary factors that professional SEO agencies take into account to put a price on local optimization campaign, we can distinguish the following ones:

• The number of locations to optimize

It is reasonable to build and optimize different locations if you have a single website with multiple business locations. However, there are some basic recurring costs for managing multi-location local SEO campaigns. The cost of optimization services per each location starts from $750 and go up to $1,350. 

• Local links

Another local SEO essential is building authoritative links back to your site. You need to show Google that your site is authoritative, reliable and trustworthy. Local links are especially important as they help to grow the business reputation and improve brand awareness. Quality local links are rather expensive. You need to expect to pay for it from $500 to $3,000. 

• Citations

Citations are not less significant than links for local business development. To make your products or services visible to your targeted audience you may need up to 100 citations, depending upon the industry you are ranking in. 

Among other more general determinants of local SEO pricing, I can enumerate the following ones:

Situation

The real state of affairs on this period. Where are you currently ranking and how much time it will take to improve the situation?

• Objectives

Your business needs and goals. Where do you want to be and how fast?

• Timeline

What time does an SEO team have to bring you the first optimization result?

Looking at these elements your optimization agency can set a fair price for your local SEO project. 

What services can you expect paying for local optimization?

Generally speaking, local SEO services are used to help ensure that people searching for local businesses can easily find your site and click on it instead of your competitors. Everything seems easy from the first glance. However, in reality, there a lot of factors behind the scene that affect your position on search results page. Some of them are relatively simple, and done one time, while others are more complex and must be built over time. Local optimization requires both on- and off-site optimization tactics. Both of these optimization approaches are necessary to achieve sufficient optimization results. 

Let us have a closer look at the basic optimization services and their pricing:

• Link building/ citations

To determine the rank of your website, Google looks not only on your web source optimization, but it takes into account what other people tell you. Wherever it encounters a place that cites your business or has a link back to your website. 

The more authoritative web sources link to your site, the more chances to rank higher on Google you have. These link should be relevant and bring some helpful information to readers. So, they need to be inserted in the valuable content which is relevant to the theme of your website. Moreover, your links should come from popular, authoritative, and trustworthy websites to show search engines that your site worths to rank higher on SERP. 

Citations also play a significant role in your business promotion. Citations are references to your website that include the essential information about your company such as business hours, telephone number, address, email, etc. Citations are used to improve your local rank and attract targeted traffic to your website. The value of citations lays inconsistency. In other words, all of your citations must be the same across the web. 

So, as the value of links and citations is so high for local businesses, SEO practitioners spend a lot of time working to develop and generate these links. You should be aware that it is quite complicated to obtain relevant and do-follow links from high-authoritative sites. It takes a lot of time and efforts as well as investments. 

• The current state of your local SEO

The current state of your local SEO can significantly affect the price of your optimization campaign. Let us discuss some common situations that can come into play. 

For example, if you have used low-quality optimization techniques in the past, it can take a great deal of time to get rid of penalties and remove all the existed barriers to good rankings.

If you have not invested in your SEO beforehand, you will have a slight advantage, but will still need several months to get significant local rankings. 

If you just establish your business online, building a positive local presence may take up to 12 months. It can be less or more depending on the niche you want to rank in. 

What is the average pricing local SEO companies provide?

So, what should you spend on local SEO? Of course, I should answer it depends. The average local SEO campaigns in our company cost from $2,000 to $3,500 per month for a single local business location. This cost can vary depending on your business goals and expectations as well as the number of a location you have. 

Hiring an SEO company or consultant, you should keep in mind that the adage “you get what you pay for” holds especially true for the digital market. It means that if you have a little SEO budget, you won’t see much in returns.