One of the most commonly asked questions by business owners is “How much does SEO cost?”
This question doesn’t actually have a single answer as the cost of SEO really boils down to two things – competition and commercial value. Lets look at the SEO needs for two companies to demonstrate the huge difference in cost from one SEO campaign to another.
Company A is a small gardening firm which operates in a ten mile radius from their home town.
Company B is a national retailer which sells electrical products through it’s website.
The owner of Company A only wants to attract customers that are in his area so he isn’t interested in having his website rank for generic terms such as ‘gardening company’ or ‘lawn maintenance’. Based on his geographic area, the search data says there are only around 300 people a month searching for his service. Because the search volumes are quite low (although 300 visitors a month is great for a small business), there isn’t a a great deal of competition so getting Company A’s website to rank well for a localised term such as ‘Gardening services in Anytown’ is quicker and easier to achieve.
As a typical example, to get a website ranked in the top 3 of Google results for a localised terms the cost is likely to be around £100 per month for a maximum of 3 months.
Now let’s look at Company B. As a retailer, they stock many different products so they need to have each product and category page in their website optimised for phrases such as ‘audio products’ (category page) or ‘mp3 player’ (product page). When looking at the search data there are over 50,000 people a month searching for ‘buy mp3 player’ so there is huge commercial benefit to ranking well for such a term and obviously competition is therefore fierce.
A website that is in position 1 for a search term can expect to receive 56% of the people searching for that term so in this case, around 28,000 visitors all specifically looking to buy an mp3 player. If only 2% of those 28,000 actually purchase an mp3 player from your store you will sell 560 units every month and with a profit margin of £35.00 per unit, that single search term ranking at number 1 is worth £19,600 every month to your business – can you now see why SEO is so crucial to many online businesses?
So what would Company B have to pay for SEO on such a lucrative keyword? A highly competitive and commercially attractive search term takes a lot more work and a lot more patience but you would expect to pay around £300 – £500 a month for 8-12 months.
Obviously the above scenarios are extremes and virtually every single SEO campaign is unique so if you’d like to find out the massive benefits of SEO, you can find more information on our SEO page or you can call us on 0845 307 6177.
Tags: Cost, How Much?, SEO, UK
