Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential service for businesses and website owner looking to improve their online presence and drive organic traffic to their website. However, many are surprised by the costs associated with professional SEO services and shocked at seemingly and what they get for their money. Here’s a look at why SEO can be expensive:
Labour Intensive
Fundamentally SEO is labor intensive and one thing any business owner knows is labour is not cheap, especially for professionals! For a given month its not uncommon for a site to require between 10-20 hours of work spent on it broken between different tasks.
Research & Strategy
One of the first steps of the SEO professional beginning the SEO process for the month is research and ensuring what they are doing is making a positive difference.
Common tasks which the agency will do include:
- Tracking website analytics to determine if strategy is working
- Researching Target Keywords the sites customers are using and can realistically rank for, in particular long-tail-keywords
- Investigating competitors strategies for potential opportunities and insight on if its working
- Creating lists of potential content ideas and focus keywords
- Determining the best use of fund allocation for the month, ie more backlinks, content or technical work on the site
High Quality Content Creation
Writing original high quality content that will rank doesn’t come cheap. While AI can assist this process in some cases, hiring professional writers is often a necessity to write engaging content .
Most agencies will charge in house professional writers out at over $85/hour with a basic ~1000 word blog post taking a few hours to write including research on the topic. For certain complex topics and niches, specialist writers may be required at hundreds of dollars an hour.
Other sometimes unexpected expenses creating content that eats into your budget may include: Licencing images, Graphic Design for Infographics.
Technical Site Changes
From time to time your SEO agency may deem it necessary to perform maintenance on the site itself and focus on ‘on-page SEO’ which can consume many hours of professional time.
Types of technical work you can expect to be performed include:
- Ensuring the site is mobile friendly and still works on all common web-browsers
- Optimising Site for fast loading: Compressing Images, removing Slow Scripts
- Investigating Usability Concerns:
- Creating Internal Links to other content on your site
- Looking for broken links and duplicate content
- Refreshing old content
- Checking and updating On-Page SEO: keywords, tags, meta descriptions
Expensive Tools
Performing SEO to the professional level requires various very expensive paid tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink tracking, and performance monitoring which adds a significant overhead.
Examples of these costs and tools include which SEO professionals use include:
- Ahrefs (From USD$129/mo) – SEO toolkit allowing keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, rank tracking
- Semrush (From USD$129.95/mo) – SEO toolkit allowing competitor analysis, keyword research, website audit, backlink analysis, advertising tools
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free to USD$250/year) – Onsite SEO analysis, Audits, Manually generate Sitemaps
Quality Backlinks Cost Money
One of the most misunderstood aspects of SEO is that creating backlinks are free. This simply is not true and the short answer is you either pay for them in time/effort, or with cash.
The most common methods of obtaining links back to your site include:
- Reaching out to third party sites for a backlink: Broken Back Link Building, Guest Posts, Brand Mentions
- Buying backlinks from High Authority sites
- Finding Niche directories and other places to list your site
Conclusion
Hopefully this post gives you an overview of where your thousands of dollars a month are going to! Remember that SEO is a long term investment for your site and adds lasting value.
Are you spending your SEO budget differently or have other idea to get maximum value? Let us know in the comments below