Which services can fall into SEO pricing list?

In our days almost all businesses decide how much to spend on search engine optimization. There are a lot of value propositions on the market that provides different SEO pricing lists depending on the level of their experience, and the amount of work. 

When I hear a question about the price of optimization services from my clients, I always try to explain that it depends on the variety of factors. However, the starting business owners and marketing people usually feel frustrated when they hear such an answer. That is why we decided to create a comprehensive article where you will find all relevant information concerning optimization services and their pricing. 

Why do you need to pay for SEO?

Have you ever wonder why the price of SEO services is continuously raising. It can be explained by the high demand in this field. More and more businesses find real value in search engine optimization. There are a lot of examples when SEO helps businesses to expand their power and win more leads. Simply put, website owners are ready to pay for SEO services as they know they will obtain a high return on investment. You should not wonder why the pricing for SEO can vary from $400 to 40,000. This price is justified because you get a full range of services for this money. 

Let us discuss what services can fall into SEO pricing list:

• Market research

Market research is essential for further optimization campaign development. It helps to understand optimization purposes and determine the amount of work SEO specialists need to do to make your online business prosperous. Complex market research involves researching your company, its competitors, and industry in general. Conducting marketing research, specialists can determine what marketing strategies and tactics will be most effective in your space. 

• Competitive analysis

On the next stage of the pre-optimization process, marketers conduct the in-depth competitive analysis. This process involves researching the TOP niche competitors and their marketing tactics. It helps to understand the strong and weak points of your competitors and build an optimization strategy in such a way to outsmart them.

In-depth competitor analysis includes researching such aspects:

1. Link profiles

It helps to understand how competitors acquire their quality backlinks and whether you can benefit from some of these links or not.

2. On-site optimization

On-site optimization helps to understand what search terms your competitors use to rank on the web. Moreover, you can pick up some content and design ideas researching the websites of our competitors.

3. Content market activities

SEO experts research the activities of your competitors to understand how they use content for link attraction.  

• Optimization strategy development and implementation

On this stage, SEO specialists develop a winning optimization strategy for your business based on the obtained results from marketing researchers. They take into account all possible optimization aspects and techniques that will help you to improve your site's’ performance in the organic search results. As a rule, these strategies are almost the same for all new businesses. Long lasting and substantial business requires a creative approach to get optimization results in the face of stronger competitors. 

• Keyword research

Keyword research is at the heart of any search engine optimization campaign. It is a key to your future optimization success. That is why most SEO specialists advise conducting keyword research with the help of professional experts, and with the usage of third-party keyword research tools. This process involves researching relevant search terms that your potential customers use to find your site on the web. With the help of different professional keyword research tools, SEO specialists check the search volume of each keyword and assess their relevance. Moreover, experts study customer’s behavior to understand how they search for the website online. 

In the longer run, it helps to craft compelling content, page titles and meta descriptions. 

For small or local businesses keyword research typically happens at the beginning of the engagement. It helps SEO specialists to make relevant content improvement recommendations. 

For large ecommerce sites, keyword research is an ongoing activity that requires monthly optimizations to help get more and more pages ranking in the search results. 

• On-site optimization

On-site optimization is all about internal optimization process that can be entirely controlled by you and your SEO team. During this optimization process, a group of SEO specialists will be improving the inner structure of your site, drafting SEO content, optimizing metadata, fixing duplicate content issues, improving interlinking, and providing site redesign is it is needed.  

• Off-site optimization

Off-page SEO refers to the techniques that can be used to improve the position of the website on search results page. This process is not controlled by SEO specialists like on-site optimization. The success of off-site SEO depends on the number of relevant references on a site. It includes link building, social media and social bookmarking.

Typical pricing list for SEO services

All SEO payment models can be divided into four primary groups - hourly consulting rate, a monthly retainer, contract services at a fixed price, and project-based pricing. 

Hourly consulting services cost from $100 to $300 per hour. The price can vary depending on the level of consultant proficiency you are working with. If you hire an individual SEO specialist, the rate will be lower. 

The rate for monthly optimization services is also not stable. It starts at 750$ and finishes with $5,000 per month. Your bill will depend on the size of your business and the extent of services provided by the agency. You will pay a lower fee for small SEO agencies that provide a limited amount of services. Full-services optimization agencies will offer higher prices (from $2,500 to $5,000). 

Contract services pricing is variable. That is why we can’t state a definite price range for these services. Typically contract services include things like link profile audit, SEO copywriting, and social media site setup. 

The same about project-based pricing. The price on such optimizations services differs from one project to another. SEO service providers take into account project’s complexity and the amount of work they need to accomplish.