How Much Does SEO Cost? The Honest Answer

How much does SEO cost? And how much you need to spend to grow?

After reading this, you’ll have a very good idea of why to invest, what’s all involved, the true cost, and how much to spend on optimizing your site for search engines.

First, What’s The Value of SEO?

Hunting for sales is difficult.

For example, your business may have to invest in sales reps, train said reps, manage them, and then give them months to build a prospect base. This is all while they’re getting little to no deals closed in the beginning.

Plus, you run the risk of these sales reps quickly leaving for a new job. This is extremely expensive!

Now the value of SEO is your customers come to you on their own. A prospect Google searches for a solution, finds your site, clicks, and makes a buying action.

This all takes place without one second of your involvement. (Of course, to get here you would have needed to invest in advance.)

Instead of hunting, you’re attracting sales like a magnet. Common sense, and data, shows that buyers are more likely to convert when it’s their decision, versus feeling heavily pushed into a deal.

The end result is less work, more revenue, and greater profit when you invest in SEO.

SEO Case Study

A case study does the best job of showing the worth of driving organic traffic to your website.

One of our customers in California produced the following results over one year.

12 Month SEO Budget: $105,000

New Revenue: $490,000

Return on investment: $385,000

Percentage ROI: 366%

And get this, while this customer’s sales and revenue continue to increase significantly, the SEO management expense stays the same. Meaning this company is unlocking major profit gains month after month.

Eventually the SEO management fee will decrease into a maintenance fee or go away entirely.

Think about it if this was your business, you’re now getting customer acquisition without the cost.

This is the beautiful situation our business, Robben Media, is in. Our SEO efforts have compounded over time and now we get “free customer acquisition”.

What All Goes Into Search Optimization?

A good SEO consultant is worth their weight in gold because there’s a lot to it, if you want to execute and rank at the top of Google.

Here are the main categories of search engine optimization.

1. Technical SEO

It’s very wise to have confirmation that Google can easily crawl and index your website before anything else.

Because if you have technical website errors left and right, all your other SEO efforts can go to waste. Talk about a nightmare.

What exactly is technical SEO?

It involves everything from your site speed, to your code and files readability, user friendliness, and much more. You can read this ultimate guide to learn more.

The good news is that if you tackle this right off the bat, then you should only have to maintain going forward. Now you can focus your efforts on these other search optimization strategies.

2. Keyword research

Targeting the optimal keywords is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign.

The basis of this activity is to find the specific keyword phrases your customers use to find your product or service, then analyze these for monthly search volume and keyword difficulty.

You can use a tool like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner to analyze keyword phrases. The objective is to find keywords with enough monthly search volume, but not too much competition or it will take forever to rank.

3. On-page optimization

Once you have your keyword list, you can use it to both improve your page titles, headings, and semantic content across your site, as well as create new content.

For on-page optimization, consider adding a Frequently Asked Questions section to your core pages. Doing so will provide more value to readers and improve your odds of ranking higher.

Another good idea is to add a YouTube video to your core pages. Google owns YouTube and appreciates this type of content.

4. Content creation

Definitely update your current pages and blog posts to individually target keywords.

Next it’s time to create new content on your website to go after additional keyword searches.

Focus on truly covering a subject entirely in a new blog post, with the goal of hitting 2,000 words or more. Otherwise, a wimpy 300-word blog post won’t have a major impact.

Plus, you can link to your main sales pages from this newly published content to increase your key pages’ rankings.

5. Backlink building

Many website owners stop at content creation. The phrase “content is king” has sunk deep into their brain.

However, Google evaluates websites based on their authority, and those with the most high-quality backlinks get ranked higher than those without. Link, or backlink, acquisition is simply another website linking from their site to your website, giving your site credibility in the process.

The point is you can have the best content and offer on the planet. But without link acquisition to get others to find your site at the top of Google, your content is pretty much worthless.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Before you ask how much does SEO cost, you should ask yourself how important are organic sales and growing your business? If it’s the top priority, then you’ll find the money to prioritize search optimization.

You should be spending at least $2,000 to $5,000 per month at the minimum, or as much as you can afford if you’re not at that level yet. And if you’re a brick and mortar business only trying to rank for local keywords, then it could be less like $1,000-$1,500 per month.

But overall, there are too many needs to be met — technical audit, keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, link acquisition — for a small budget. Some, or a few, core components are going to get ignored. The campaign will have weak spots, limiting your rankings.

Like anything in life, you get what you pay for. I’m sure jobs on Fiverr say they will do a great job ranking your site at $300 per month.

From experience, we know that you literally can’t do much of anything with a $300 budget. And if things go really poorly, your site could get suspended from Google for breaking the rules.

How Much Should You Spend?

Depending on your current Google rankings, your desire to grow quickly, and your cash flow, here’s how much a wise company should spend on climbing the Google rankings.

We’ll address a conservative, average, and aggressive approach.

Conservative

This conservative positioning may be for an established brand who already ranks at the top of Google and just wants to maintain their rankings, or for a new startup with limited cash to invest.

Either way, a conservative SEO approach would look like publishing around one to two new blog posts per month. As well as acquiring a few authority backlinks to sustain your domain authority.

Conservative Total: Spend 5-7% of your monthly revenue on SEO

Average

An average SEO spend is for a business who understands the power of customers searching Google, finding their site, and purchasing online, but they have other investments to pay for too.

Maybe you just hired more employees or invested in reducing your technology debt, leaving less capital available to do an aggressive SEO campaign. Spending 15% of monthly revenue will still move the needle considerably to acquire links, publish a blog post per week, and leave you well-positioned for the future.

Average Total: Spend 8-15% of your monthly revenue on SEO

Aggressive

A well-funded SaaS startup or a small- to medium-size business who believes in capturing market share first will want to spend aggressively here.

Sometimes the scenario is a business that starts with conservative or average spending, sees a dramatic return on capital, and then decides to invest every extra marketing dollar into ranking higher on Google.

At this point spending 30% of their monthly revenue feels like a no brainer because the bucket continues to grow as they pour more money into driving organic sales.

With this aggressive investment, you’ll be able to get links from top authority websites at a high frequency to boost your domain authority, organic traffic, and profits.

Aggressive Total: Spend 16-25% of your monthly revenue on SEO

Conclusion

In theory, my honest opinion is to invest as much as you responsibly can into SEO. I say this because each dollar invested can return two to 10 times the value.

We’ve seen it happen with our customers and our own business at Robben Media many times over.

Though if you’re running on paper thin margins or in a cash crunch, then investing heavily may not be an option at this point in time. You may need to budget and save up for this later down the road.

No matter what, don’t sit on the sidelines for too long or your competitors will continue to bring in all the customers from Google, while you have to work twice as hard to get sales.

Now that you can answer how much does SEO cost, how much do you plan to spend on it this year?

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