If you’re thinking of investing in SEO for your business in 2019, you may be wondering how much money you need to budget. This is a pretty easy question to ask but the answer depends on a variety of factors unique to your business, goals, available capital, and choice of partner.
Let’s dive in.
Different Companies Have Different Needs
Before looking for digital marketing or SEO help, consider exactly why you’d like assistance and what you’ll need to succeed. Are you looking for:
A guiding hand to provide you an overall SEO plan for the year and what you/your team needs to focus on for success
A comprehensive “hands-on” partner who will not only provide strategy but execute on plans and activities for you
A consultant to solve an SEO problem that’s been popping up on site and is preventing you from great rankings
Your level of comprehension and understanding of not only digital marketing but your time commitments and the way you do business will enlighten what you need from an SEO partner.
Your business’ goals will also help you determine which type of SEO help you need. Of course, everyone wants more organic traffic and sales, but the specific goals within vary by the state of your website and your company. Some SEO goals include:
Increasing keyword rankings, search visibility, and brand reputation
Increasing local SEO presence if you’re a brick-and-mortar or service business
Ensuring your website is clean and functional to be quickly and effectively read by the search engines
Increasing the amount of on and off-page content to make your company a thought leader in the industry
All are proven ways to increase organic traffic but determining which one is right for your business at its current stage will allow you to narrow in on the right partner.
Determining Your SEO Budget
Along with honing in on your goals and initial SEO needs as a company, determining a budget for an SEO partner before engaging is very helpful in ensuring you get the most bang for your buck.
By calculating your rough ROI (return on investment) from the search engines to date, you’ll know how much revenue SEO has generated your company so far, the financial potential in organic traffic increases, and your potential budget.
If you sell your products/services online, this is an exercise of filtering your Google Analytics goals by organic traffic. How many sales were attributed to organic traffic in the past 3, 6, and 12 months? How much revenue was attained? If an increase in traffic of 10% to 20% were to happen year-over-year, how much more money would be made? What percentage of that would be available as a budget for SEO/digital marketing help? Asking these questions and gathering the data will help you key in on your budget.
If you don’t have these goals set up or if your sales process extends well beyond the web, this is a matter of calculating your close rate from leads/potential customers driven by organic traffic.
If all this sounds confusing, that’s OK. Having just a general idea of how much money you make on every sale is helpful in figuring out how much money you have available for SEO services.
SEO Pricing in 2019
With your needs and potential budget nailed down, it’s time to explore how much you can expect to spend for good SEO work in 2019. Notice how we’re not talking about any type of SEO work – its easy to find cheap work out there but its likely to hurt you rather than help you.
Whoever you decide to go with, vetting SEO partners is an important part of the process to make sure they can back up their sales talk and aren’t just taking you for a ride. Ask for examples of past successes or a free site audit – most would be happy to provide either. And remember the general rule of thumb; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
SEO Agency – Monthly Retainer
If you’ve determined that you’d like to fully outsource your SEO and let someone else handle all the details, an agency might be right for you. Agencies vary just as much as your SEO needs, with some offering specified experience into areas like eCommerce and some touting advanced content production resources.
You’re likely to pay a little bit more for areas of specialization, but based on research by Rand Fishkin and my experience as a veteran of multiple agencies, you can expect to devote anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 a month for a standard SEO package. Anything below $1,000 is likely very limited in scope.
For this price, you’ll get an integrated partner who learns about your business and your SEO needs inside and out. A monthly report of SEO metrics is often accompanied by a call where you go over what’s been done and what’s on deck to meet your search goals. Agencies have the potential to be an effective extension of your business that helps you increase sales through the organic channel.
The cons of employing an agency besides the monthly cost is that your business is often locked into a long-term contract and your plan features activities and features that aren’t really going to benefit your company at the end of the day – they’re just included to satisfy the monthly hours requirements.
You also have to consider supplementary costs if not discussed in the sales process or agreed to upfront in the contract, such as development work or extra content production. If these are not included, you will likely have to eat the cost processing the work on your own, or will have to spend more with the agency or utilize hours in the contract to justify the cost, which can take away from your overall SEO progress.
Even though a lot of business owners view an agency relationship as “set it and forget it,” the agency will need a high level of involvement at the start as it learns about your business and what’s important to you. You’re often charged for this setup work. After this initial on-boarding period, things are less involved, but they’ll still need your approval for work on and off-site or will rely on your company if you’ve agreed implement any recommendations.
Despite the time and the money investment here, having an agency partner could be the right choice if your company has the funds available, is ready to scale for the organic growth they could bring, and has the operational need for expert planning and execution.
SEO Consultant – Project-by-Project Contract
If you or someone on your team has a decent handle on your company’s digital marketing and are looking for someone to provide an optimization plan or to solve a technical/rankings problem, it may make sense to hire an SEO consultant on a project-by-project basis.
SEO consultants usually don’t charge by the hour but by the project, and depending on the breadth and scope, each could run you between $500 and $3,000.
With each project, you’ll agree to the scope of work, due date, and price for the project and discuss intended impact. Because each project has its own scope, if your needs change during the course of the project/investigation, you can be charged a much higher amount than originally agreed to when completed, although this is usually discussed and outlined in any sales collateral. If you end up having other projects come out of an initial project, the added up costs could be equal to an agency engagement because of the nature of piecemeal pricing.
If you form a good relationship with a skilled SEO consultant, you have the flexibility of bringing them in whenever you need an expert to take a look at your site, and some even offer monthly retainer hours for advice purposes at a fraction of the price of an agency engagement with a comparable level of knowledge.
In-House SEO/Digital Marketer - Salaried
If your business has grown to the point where you cannot be involved in the day-to-day nitty gritty of SEO and you want to expand into other digital marketing channels, it may make sense to hire an in-house SEO/Digital Marketer. This person would have their finger on the pulse of any and all SEO initiatives within your company and would even be able to pitch in with content production, analytical reports, and other digital marketing support.
This is probably the most expensive option of the bunch as an entry-level SEO analyst earns an average salary of $50,000, according to Glassdoor. With more experience, comes more salary as an experienced SEO specialist can cost up to and above $100,000 a year. If hiring a jack-of-all-trades digital marketer with an SEO specialty, you can also expect to pay a higher salary. And just like agencies, any type of niche experience/requirements will bump up those numbers as well.
The costs are high here, but also the potential benefits. Having a seasoned SEO on staff means that your organic channel will be a huge source of revenue for your company and the costs will likely offset themselves. Also consider that having an SEO integrated within your company means that you have an expert who cares personally about the growth of the business. They will often come up with more innovative ideas than an agency, who is always afraid that you will cancel the contract if they think too outside the box and don’t stick to proven strategies, or a consultant, who is looking to you for thoughts on what needs to be improved.
Some supervision and direction is needed, as with any employee, but you can expect an on-staff SEO is diagnose any problems holding your website back, set KPIs (key performance indicators) for years to come, and drive strategy to hit those goals.
The Overlooked Option – Hiring and Training Up
A tactic that is rarely discussed but a great option is to hire someone who has an interest in digital marketing, train them up and let them run with it. This could save you thousands upon thousands of dollars and give you all the aforementioned benefits of having someone on staff at a fraction of the cost.
This is actually how I learned SEO inside and out. Early in my career, I was hired by an eCommerce group with multiple websites and was first tasked with implementing their then agency’s on-page recommendations and content suggestions. One day, my boss came to me letting me know that we had to let the agency go due to budget reasons and that he’d like me to take over. I had been paying close attention to what they had been doing and he supported that knowledge with tons of articles and mentoring on how to tackle the more technical stuff.
It was a trial by fire and I made a ton of mistakes but in the course of my time taking over the SEO of the company, I assisted with the migration of 3 websites, got hundreds of product descriptions, blogs and videos produced, skyrocketed our organic traffic, and became an expert in my field.
Not only do you give back and pay it forward with this path, but you save money. This trainee could often be an intern, who is performing the work for school credit, or an entry-level worker with high analytical, critical thinking, and writing skills that would cost you an average of $30-$40K a year. Of course, having the agency in-place at the start will require those costs for a set period of time, but from there, you can decrease their involvement. Having performance raises/bonuses will motivate your employee to experiment and try to hit company KPIs, and they will be grateful for the opportunity to be learning a valuable, marketable skill on the job.
SEO is Worth Paying For
SEO in 2019 is not cheap, but the potential benefits are numerous. No matter the partner you choose or goal you’d like to reach, having a revenue stream directly connected to the way people search on a daily basis is something that pays for itself when done right.
APSEO can help you wherever you are in your SEO journey. If you’d like to learn more about SEO/digital marketing, or train an employee, we offer personalized training and education services. We also offer SEO site audit, roadmap, partner vetting, and other digital marketing consulting services. Contact us today.