Monday, March 5, 2012

How Much Should You Expect to Pay for SEO Services?

The answer to this question is that how much you pay for SEO services depends on several factors. First of all how big is your website and how do you think SEO can help? Secondly how much money can you afford to spend on SEO? Thirdly have you thought about what kind of SEO service your site needs?

Pay Scale for SEOThe top notch SEO services charge top dollar because they employ staff which will include receptionist, cleaners and ancillary staff as well as SEO experts. They will have an office suite to maintain and pay for. These basic running costs will be passed on to clients in their fee structure. Their services are expensive because they want to limit their client-base to large high profile companies with which they can work on a continuous basis. The bigger the company, the greater the need for SEO services, especially when new products and services are launched. They will also employ staff to work on online reputation management, although this is a separate issue.

Such companies will charge in the region of $1,000 US an hour for consultation only. However if you approach a smaller concern, you will expect to pay between $40 and $50 per hour. For a review of your site plus a consultation prices begin at around $500 and go up to around $20K.

You can opt to take a series of SEO seminars, and depending whether they are held on your premises or those of the SEO service, you can be charged from $750 to $12,000 for a day. That is a way forward if you want to do your own SEO

Some companies will charge a monthly retainer for their continued services and this costs between $2,500 and $20,000 plus. This guarantees the service when you need it and some SEO services will charge much less if they do not work for you during a month.

SEO services might, if they are extremely confident in their abilities, offer you a package which is rather like a pay Per Click (PPC) one, in that they bill you for the amount of traffic that comes to your site after SEO work and for the climb your pages have in the Search Engine Rankings pages (SERPS) and a share of your sales revenue after they have done the initial SEO work for you. This is called Standard Profit Sharing and you will have to pay a relevantly small amount as a down payment. There is also a Modified Profit sharing package which is more like a pay per action deal, where they get a share of the revenue from sales and not money from traffic or place in the SERPS.

A keyword search package is probably the cheapest SEO service you can buy, starting at $100 and going up to $2,000 or thereabouts. If you want someone to edit your pages and add keywords and links, then you can expect to pay $2,000 at the lowest end of the scale, although if you shop around you may get a better price. A manual link-building campaign will typically cost you $500 at the lower end of the SEO service scale.

Basically you get what you pay for, but you can get good SEO services from smaller companies who have staff who are knowledgeable in the field and who have a good reputation, as they don't have the overheads of large concerns. The people who work in small SEO services are often people who have decided to go it lone after seeing what can be earned by the larger companies. They can offer you their services more cheaply because they want your business and are more concerned about paying off their mortgages early than with making megabucks. Don't discount the little firms, but do take care when choosing them.

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