What is the fair pricing for SEO?

There are several common traps in which businesses fall into when it comes to SEO plans and budgets. One of them does not have a clear optimization plan, while others do not have a budget. Both of these groups are doomed to failure. When it comes to SEO, failure means loss of money, time, efforts, and valuable opportunities. While your website is not well optimized, your potential customers can’t reach your product pages and purchase something. In other words, each day you lose your opportunities to win new leads and sales. 

In this article, we will discuss how to create a simple plan and budget to make sure your search engine optimization works for your benefit. But before we proceed to these tips, I would like to highlight several essential facts you need to know about SEO. 

First of all, it is worth to mention that SEO is a long-term strategy that yields result in the long run. So how long does take for SEO to work? As a rule, it takes from four to six month to get the first visible optimization results, and from six to twelve months to get complete optimization results. Do not believe anybody who promises you to bring good optimization results within one or two months. As a rule, it takes time for search engines to parse website changes. That is why nothing will change until the end of the second optimization month. The results of the third and fourth month will also be minimal. That is why you should not be panic and stop optimizing your site if there are any results for the first optimization period. 

The second fact we need to discuss is that SEO can be cheap. As practice shows a good SEO can’t be cheap as it requires significant time spendings. If you are hiring a well-known optimization company with an excellent reputation and professional stuff, you should be expected to pay up to $5,000 per month, at a minimum. Of course, this sum can be higher or lower depending on the level of optimization (local, country, global), business niche, website position, competition level, and so on. 

If you have a serious approach to your online business development, you should be committed to spending 12 months and $36,000-$60,000 to build a winning optimization campaign that will bring your business success. 

Once you understand these facts about SEO and are prepared to start working with an SEO company, you should build a strategic SEO plan and budgeting. Below I will explain you how. 

SEO plan and budget

• Select a metric

Select a metric you are going to measure and answer you a question why do you need to measure it accurately. You may focus on traffic, leads, sales, or any other types of conversion. 

• Define a goal

On the initial stage of your optimization campaign, you should decide what kind of increase do you want. For example, you may wish to 10% or 30% increase in sales on a monthly basis over the next 12 months or a definite increase in the number of newsletter subscriptions. Each business has its own goal that should be at the core of optimization campaign.