How much should you pay for small business SEO?

It is a well-known fact that all businesses need search engine optimization services to attract targeted traffic to their pages. Whether you are a small local business or a vast online enterprise, everything you need to make your business closer to your targeted audience is SEO. 

The problem is that even if we know the principle of SEO work, we do not have much should we pay for it. Many optimization companies do not provide any guarantee on results. In other words, you pay for something uncountable and challenging to evaluate. This fact makes a lot of online merchants feel frustrated. 

In this article, we will discuss several SEO pricing factors that will help small businesses understand more about SEO, pricing, and services. Moreover, I will show you how we determine the pricing for SEO services.

Facts you should know about SEO pricing

SEO services pricing depends on the consultant’s business model

Some SEO specialists provide only consulting services, while others offer complex optimization, making changes on a website. SEO services pricing may vary drastically depending on consultant’s business models. One specialist charges a fixed price for their services such as content writing, market research, competitive analysis, and so on. Others charge only an hourly or monthly rate for their optimization services, not taking into account the size of business and company’s goals. That is why this pricing is not always fair. The most reasonable SEO pricing model is project-based when you pay for the number of services and optimization techniques required for your business. Some of the SEo consultants might even make performance-based contracts, where the small business owner pays a percentage of the revenue created by the SEO work. This model is best for small local businesses that have a limited budget.  

SEO services pricing depends on geography

The standard of living differs from one city to another. That is why hiring an SEO consultant in New York will cost you more than the same consulting services in Wisconsin. It is not universally true, but it is true that many products and services are more costly in larger cities. An SEO consultant from New York can support a higher cost just as it supports a higher price for web design services, attorney fees, and many other types of services. 

Companies that charge less than $500 per month look suspicious

Most people generally wouldn’t trust an SEO company that charges less than $500 per month. This rate is closer to hourly payment and cant even cover the cost of underlying optimization strategies implementation. An SEO company that only charges $500 per month won’t do much for your business or even make matters worse. Such low-cost SEO can be done with the help of spam bots and automated link building. 

So, if you can’t afford to pay for SEO more than $500 per month, I advise you to do SEO by yourself. It will be better to learn the basics of SEO by yourself than paying for fraudulent and nonprofessional consultants. 

Regards SEO as an investment in your online business development

Hiring an SEO company or an individual consultant, you should think over the return on investment, not your spendings. You get what you pay for. That is why investing your time, money and efforts in website optimization and advertising; you will get a high return. SEO services that cost more then $1,000 per month may seem a lot of small businesses, by what if you get $5,000 per month in increased revenues? As well as any other marketing strategies, SEO is about ROI. If you invest X and get back 3X, the actual amount of that X is doesn’t matter. 

No one optimization company can give you a guarantee

The sad truth about SEO is that nobody can give you a real guarantee that search engine optimization campaign will bring you a result. SEO world is not stable. Search engines continuously update their algorithms and provide new optimization rules. So, you need to be ready that one day Google may drastically change ranking system and all your optimization efforts will be wasted. You never know what outside factors can affect your SEO success. That is why you should avoid companies that provide you 100% guarantees as it is impossible. 

How do optimization companies determine small business SEO pricing?

There are some essential factors SEO companies use to gauge the cost of SEO services.

First of all, SEO experts make a website analysis and determine whether a website is brand new or old and trusted. If the client’s website is old and trusted, SEO services usually cost less than for brand new domains as the specialists need to spend less time on website improvement. While it is not difficult to build an optimization campaign on a brand new website, it takes some time for the new domain to get crawled and indexed properly. That is why new online businesses often require carefully planned link building campaign to achieve TOP rankings in a reasonable amount of time. 

Moreover, SEO specialists should be aware whether a website has a penalty or not. While some sanctions are easy to offset, others can be quite a challenge. As a rule, working with the penalized website require more efforts and time investments. SEO experts need to craft more content, build extra links, and manually massage webmasters to remove the bad links. Sometimes, it takes more than six months to get rid of penalties. So, it can be more cost effective to start with the new domain than try to offset a penalty. 

Final thoughts

To sum everything that was mentioned that considering SEO and its cost, you should keep in mind that there are no shortcuts to true, long-lasting SEO success. You need to invest either time or money in your SEO to get the results and high return on investment. Remember that nothing matters more than ROI. That is why hiring an optimization agency you need to think over the results you can get from quality optimization rather than costs you will need to spend on this optimization.