What you're paying for when you hire an SEO professional is not only their time spent on your site, but for the expertise they are constantly accumulating by keeping up with changes to search trends and search engine behaviours.
SEO professionals spend a lot of time at the start of their career using trial and error to find the best way to get sites ranking higher on Google. You're paying to skip straight to the results, to not spend hours obsessing over wording, layout and headings. You're paying, as with any profession, to not have to learn the art yourself.
So how much is a reasonable fee for SEO?
SEO comes in a few forms, so lets look at them separately.
What is a reasonable fee for a single SEO analysis?
I have heard of ridiculously high costs for a single analysis – up to $80k in one case, but that was for an intricate analysis of an extremely large corporate site so it may have been justified.
Rest assured that this is not the ballpark for most businesses.
In general if you want an SEO analysis including recommended changes for a site under ten pages you should expect to pay $600 - $1500 depending on the number of keywords and pages you'd like analysed.
What is a reasonable fee for a one-off SEO analysis including implemented revisions?
This will depend on various factors relating to both your industry and your site such as:
- Quality and quantity of competition for your selected keyphrases
- How many keyphrases you have selected
- How many pages and how much text on your site.
- How much content needs to be written from scratch
What is a reasonable fee for ongoing SEO?
This will depend on all the same dot points as above, but in general you should allocate $2k - $8k per year for ongoing Search Engine Optimisation. This should include monthly reports so you can monitor the effectiveness of SEO efforts. Most SEO companies will want you to agree to at least 6 months.
Prices increase if your site has more pages, if you want to optimise for more keyphrases or if you are trying to tackle high-demand keyphrases. If you want to incorporate link-building, that's an entirely different task again.
