What is the average price of ecommerce SEO services?

The cost of SEO may vary on the different factors such as the number of search terms need to be targeted, the level of competitiveness within a market niche, business purposes, and needs. The more ambitious goals you have, the higher investments your optimization campaign will require. However, it is still possible to give estimates of SEO costs to use as a reference point. 

If you pay for quality optimization services, you will typically pay between $700-$3,000 per month. Whether or not that is a good value depends on such factors as return on investment and whether any risks have been taken in the process, which could see your site penalized later on. 

You should be ready that the price on optimization services do not always say about their quality. It can be so that a small optimization agency provides higher quality customized services than a prominent and well-known full-stack digital company. So, you need to base your choice on your analysis and research, but not on the advertising materials you see on the web. 

To reduce spendings on SEO, some businesses decide to hire in-house SEO team. Let us compare the prices on outsourcing SEO and in-house SEO. For a local business that targets from 5 to 10 search terms, the cost of doing SEO is between $5,000-$12,000 a year. 

If to talk about in-house SEO, you will also need to invest time and efforts into your business search engine optimization, which, of course, is not free. Doing SEO in-house, you will need to pay a salary for each member of your SEO team. The salary will depend on the proficiency level of your employee and an average salary rate in your state. How much time it takes you to do SEO in-house depends on the personnel available and the abilities they have. On average you should expect to allocate from 5 to 15 hours per month to do SEO, not taking into account the time required for learning and adapting stage. 

Factors that affect e-commerce SEO services pricing

What follows is a breakdown of the SEO costs for a local small business doing in-house SEO. We take the costs and estimates for the first year of SEO. Let us enumerate the factors that may affect the pricing of e-commerce SEO services doing in-house:

• Education (20-40 hours)

Educate your stuff for SEO will take time but not money. There is no need to pay for SEO courses or books, everything you need you can find online. There are a lot of blogs and forums devoted to SEO. Moreover, all SEO books are placed on the web. Everything you need is to structurize the obtained data. There is no need to learn any upper-intermediate or expert SEO processes. Basic SEO knowledge will be enough to outsmart your niche competitors on the local level. 

• Research (10-20 hours)

You need to start your optimization campaign with comprehensive research both keywords and competitors. Keyword research you can do either manually or with the implementation of different online tools. One of the best keyword research tools which are called Google’s Keyword Tool you can use for free. Moreover, you can try some other online tools available on the web. As a rule, they provide the first trial month. 

Conducting competitive analysis, you will need either professional marketer's help or some paid tools which cost around $200 per month. The plus is that you do not need to do a competitive analysis each month. You need to do it at the initial stage of your SEO campaign, and then every 5 or 6 months. 

• On-site optimization (15-20 hours)

If you know and practice on-site optimization strategies, you can do it by yourself. The best part of it is that in contrast to off-site optimization, you have full control under on-site optimization processes. So, if you feel comfortable editing the code of your site or have programmers in your stuff, then you can do this for no cost. If you do not have any practice in coding, I advise you to outsource this part of work as even one small error can make it difficult or even impossible for you to rank highly. 

• Content (20-40 hours)

Content crafting and optimization is an essential part of your online optimization campaign. Your content needs to be engaging, unique and well readable. It is critical to creating a description or short text for each product/service/package. So the amount of content will depend on the amount of inventory you sell. If you run e-commerce business selling a lot of small items, you will need to write a description for each item plus texts for all website sections. Moreover, you should have 5-15 asset pages of authority content to attract backlinks and social media activity. Additionally, if you have a blog, you need to update your content there every 2-4 weeks. If you have some writing skills or one of your staff members, have, you should try to write all this content by yourself as no-one knows your business better than you and your team. However, if you are not sure about the results, it is better to hire a skilled copywriter. 

• Link building (+ 40 hours)

To rank high on Google search results page, you need to have high website authority and reputation. These metrics Google can check the backlinks that point to your site. It is difficult to generate organic backlinks, but it is what Google requires from online businesses. You should not pay for backlinks as it is technically against Google guidelines. However, while you can rank highly using only free backlinks, in practice some money will be certainly required, especially if you want to improve your rank in a competitive niche. So, placing your link on some of the popular and authoritative web sources and online magazines will cost you from $1,000 to $50,000 per link. In some specific cases, a price can be something as high as $80,000 per link if we talk about New York Post or Guardian article about your business with an active link on your web page.