The main topic of this article is the price of search engine optimization - what it consists of, how much one should pay for it, and what should be considered before purchasing services. Search engine optimization helps potential customers find your business through organic search results at any time of the day, from anywhere in the world. The higher you rank on the results pages, the more clicks and traffic your website receives. This is the aim of search engine optimization or SEO.
In addition to the amount of web traffic, the purpose of search engine optimization is to increase its quality, which helps to achieve the ultimate goal of optimization; increasing sales. Because search engine optimization improves the user experience of the website, customers are also more likely to become repeat buyers.
It sounds nice, but at this point, of course, the question arises, how much does this pleasure cost and what does the price of search engine optimization consist of? Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this, as the price of search engine optimization varies depending on the goals of the company, the condition of the website, and the provider.
Whether you are a local entrepreneur or an online merchant, after reading this article, you will know all the factors that affect the price of search engine optimization and what kind of costs you can expect for your case.
Why should a company invest in search engine optimization?
Let's start by telling why it is generally worth investing in search engine optimization. As we mentioned above, search engine optimization helps increase website traffic and brand awareness through organic or non-paid search results.
Search engine optimization is a very cost-effective marketing method, as while your competitors spend fortunes on paid web traffic, you can get quality web traffic to your site without paying for it directly.
You can still buy advertising space and thus further enhance sales, but if your budget is tight, you should definitely start marketing your business with search engine optimization of your website. This is due to a couple of things.
Search engine optimization improves your site's visibility and customer experience
Firstly, search engine optimization has a positive impact on the user experience of the site. Succeeding in the user experience is an essential part of succeeding in e-commerce, as if your own website is even slightly slow, clumsy, or in some other way annoying to use, the potential customer will not see it worthwhile and simply leaves the site.
Your competitor with better websites will thank you for all the trades you give him practically.
Secondly, search engine optimization affects how well paid advertising, and especially Google ads, work. Google indeed examines the technical features of websites when determining their search rankings, as it too wants to offer visitors the best possible user experience. (And if your potential customer doesn't get it, you won't make trades again.)
At this point, website loading speed becomes a special focus of examination, but other site features, such as structure, linking, content, and code also have an effect on how user-friendly search engines and customers consider your website.
All of these things are what search engine optimization aims to improve.
Why isn't the price of search engine optimization listed anywhere?
The aforementioned aspects are therefore areas of search engine optimization that are polished to prime condition during optimization.
What interventions need to be done to improve the condition of the site and achieve the goals of search engine optimization depends on the initial state of your website. In practice, your site's condition could be anything from poor, really bad, great, "just okay", to good, but with some room for improvement.
This is why it is almost impossible to set a fixed price for search engine optimization that would be the same for everyone.
What does search engine optimization typically cost?
The price of search engine optimization varies. However, it is usually about thousands of euros, and depending on the provider, the price can be significantly lower or higher. It's a good idea to compare search engine optimization prices when looking for the right partner for yourself.
When planning your marketing budget, keep in mind that choosing the cheapest option can turn out to be expensive later when poorly executed search engine optimization does not bring the desired results and the interventions that have already been carried out have to be corrected again by another expert.
Therefore, it is particularly important to choose a professional partner who knows their business for sure. (You can find more tips on how to choose the right actor for you at the end of this article.)
Because search terms and the criteria set by search engines also change constantly, search engine optimization does not become ready at once. Search engine optimization should be continuously developed so that customers would find their way to your website now and in the future. The best approach is to consider search engine optimization as a monthly investment that lays a strong foundation for all other marketing.
In addition, there are different pricing models for search engine optimization.
At Growly, we want to deliver the best possible results to our customers, so the price of our search engine optimization is based on how much time our experts have to spend on it. The price of search engine optimization done by Growly varies depending on the needs and goals of the company with us between a few hundred and thousands, always according to the customer's budget and as agreed in advance.
Because it is part of our mission to help businesses of all sizes grow, including small ones, we mention here that we currently offer search engine optimization at a promotional price of as low as 329 € - 699 € / month.
The best way to find out the exact price is to book an appointment with us or another industry company for a survey. But if you want to get a bit of a clue about what optimization might cost in your case, keep reading. Next, we will go through the factors that affect the final price of search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization price - Factors that determine the price of optimization
The price of search engine optimization depends on the type of work your website needs to increase visibility.
In order to get the most out of the marketing budget, the search engine optimization expert customizes the services according to the company's goals and the strategy aimed at achieving them, as well as the website being optimized.
All sites are different, but the following services and issues are what make the biggest difference in search engine optimization pricing:
Technical search engine optimization
The initial state of the website
Search engine algorithms and the criteria set for websites are constantly updated, meaning what worked on websites a few years ago may not work today.
In addition to search engine optimization, every webpage must meet certain basic criteria, which, however, many companies still do not meet. Examples include a website loading speed of less than two seconds, scalability for mobile devices, optimized structure, and seamless user experience.
If your website’s technical condition is in need of an update, you can expect the price of search engine optimization to be at the higher end. In that case, the site undergoes technical search engine optimization, which, as its name implies, covers all technical aspects of the site.
The main goal of tweaking the technology is, of course, to improve the user experience. This is done so that Google would classify your site as recommendable and visitors would actually do what you want them to do on the site, such as making a purchase or contacting your company.
If the webpages are really in poor condition, it is often faster and cheaper to renew the site completely.
If the technology of your web pages is already in order and your search engine rankings are already good, maintaining and improving that situation will cost less than starting work from scratch.
Keyword research
Keyword research helps to find out what search terms your target audience types into search engines when looking for companies like yours and the products or services they offer.
Based on the keywords, the content of the web pages is optimized so that your site appears in search results that include those keywords. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the exact keywords and key phrases that your potential customers use and to create content that matches these searches.
At the same time, the search engine optimizer checks the competitive situation of the search terms and analyses which keywords or terms can be used to improve the search engine visibility of your site most effectively. Thorough keyword research is therefore the basis of all search engine optimization.
Often during a professional keyword research, it also turns out that the company's website does not receive traffic with the same search terms as the entrepreneur might have thought or planned.
For these reasons, keyword research is invariably done with every search engine optimization.
Internal search engine optimization
The content of web pages
The amount and quality of content on an existing website affect how much search engine optimization will cost you. And contrary to popular belief, internal search engine optimization involves much more than just adding keywords to the text.
Such things as optimizing images and videos, titling pages, internal linking, and reviewing the site for conflicting or missing meta information and other content (as these affect search engine rankings negatively), are all part of internal search engine optimization.
You can certainly produce some of the web content yourself, such as texts, but then you cannot be fully certain that this area of search engine optimization has been done correctly.
We at Growly can also guide and help our customers with ongoing content optimization, for example, every time the website is updated, but even then the search engine ranking of the content on the site is up to Google.
External search engine optimization
Backlinks to the site
Backlinks have long been one of the most important factors that search engines use in determining the search rankings of web pages.
The higher quality your backlinks are, the higher your site will also appear in search results containing desired keywords. This is because quality backlinks tell Google and other search engines that your website is, for example, reliable and relevant.
Because building backlinks can take some time, this task also contributes to the final price of search engine optimization.
The amount and level of competition
Since you are competing for search engine rankings with other companies in your industry, the amount of competition may affect the price of search engine optimization, depending on the situation.
At the beginning of search engine optimization, background research on your competitors should be done and taken into account how often they publish quality content, how much of it is already ready, and how well your competitors have committed to their target audience.
The answers to these questions can either make it easier or harder to increase the visibility of your own website, as if the level of your competitors is high, the goal of your website's search engine optimization will be to achieve the same situation and ideally exceed it (which may not be an easy task).
If, on the contrary, the level is weak, you will be able to achieve a higher place in organic search results and increase brand awareness faster than usual.
The size of the website
In order for organic visibility in search engines to grow in the long term and web traffic to the site to increase as intended, search engine optimization should focus on the entire website and not just parts of it or only half of all pages.
This means that the larger your website is, the more likely it is to require more man-hours and increase the cost of search engine optimization.
In addition to performing search engine optimization, planning and research also take time.
For example, creating a comprehensive action plan and checking which pages need to be updated during search engine optimization takes more or less time depending on the size of the website.
Goals and planning of search engine optimization
Because well planned is half done, some time should also be spent on planning search engine optimization.
The planning work begins at the start of cooperation by mapping out the goals of the search engine optimization to be performed and the means by which the goals are achieved within the client's budget. The more grandiose the goals are, the more actions need to be taken for them and naturally, this affects the price of search engine optimization.
Based on the needs and goals of the client company, a search engine optimization plan is drawn up. In order to make search engine optimization as effective as possible, the partner doing the optimization should also spend time getting acquainted with the client's business.
The practical implementation of search engine optimization begins with defining the keywords that support the client's business. These can also be brainstormed together with the client. After this, the search engine optimizer performs extensive keyword research, which serves as the basis for the optimization to be performed.
If a proper plan is not made at the beginning of the operation, the entrepreneur may well wake up to the fact that the original price of search engine optimization has skyrocketed during the process, because all the necessary interventions were not taken into account.
Of course, no one wants to end up in this situation, and that's why the professional search engine optimizer should be able to plan and organize the whole process from start to finish before starting the actual optimization. To avoid adjustments and misunderstandings, it's also important that communication between the client and the maker works well. That's why it's especially important to choose a capable and personally compatible creator for search engine optimization, not necessarily the cheapest one.
Results analysis and development
Results analysis and development are part of search engine optimization whenever you have outsourced the maintenance and continuous optimization of the website to a partner.
Without data analysis and results development, it is not possible to achieve long-term results in search engine optimization. Only by regularly monitoring analytics can we understand what results the search engine optimization provides you with and how those results can be improved.
Based on the data, decisions are made about new actions aimed at increasing website traffic and conversions (which can be, for example, sales or contacts) further.
If you leave the data unused, you can never know which actions work on your website and which do not, i.e., where it is not worth spending more time and money. In other words, the fact that your partner spends time analyzing data from your website will save you search engine optimization costs in the long run and improve the results obtained from it.
How to choose the right provider for search engine optimization?
Now that you know all the things that affect the price of search engine optimization, you might be wondering how you can choose the right partner for yourself.
Choosing the right service provider is especially important, as errors due to lack of expertise, lack of planning, and lack of communication often have to be paid for out of the entrepreneur's own pocket.
In addition to a marketing agency, you can seek help from a skilled freelancer or consultant in search engine optimization. In this case, remember to properly clarify the skills and services included in their package.
You may not get all the search engine optimization services you would get from marketing agencies from a freelancer. You can always hire several freelancers skilled in different areas of marketing, but then you also get to take on the role of project manager.
If you choose to seek help from a consultant, first find out if search engine optimization is included in the price or if you have to do it yourself, and in this case, whether you have to pay separately for each piece of advice in addition to the initial consultation. Often a consultant is happy to take care of website optimization, but if the latter is the case, you may end up paying more for advice than for search engine optimization performed by a reputable marketing agency.
Tips for those considering search engine optimization services
We give you a few more tips at the end that entrepreneurs should keep in mind when looking for or choosing a search engine optimization provider:
Does the service provider have references and proof of expertise, such as customer cases and reviews? Make sure they are available or ask about experience if references seem inadequate.
Is communication with the partner smooth? If misunderstandings seem to recur from the start or for some reason you don't trust the operator, consider changing the provider before things go further.
Are both parties definitely aware of what part of the search engine optimization is the provider's responsibility and what do you possibly want to do yourself? Ensure that these issues are addressed in, for example, the request for proposal or the assignment contract.
Be cautious of any operators who claim that search engine optimization or any other marketing action is a quick fix to every problem in your business and promise results in a suspiciously short time or for a small amount.
Beware of large advertising agencies with constantly changing staff. The results of search engine optimization can stagnate or even suffer if the person performing it is constantly changing and your business has to be reacquainted with over and over again.
However, remember that you do not need a search engine optimizer specialized in your exact industry. This is because those specialized in a certain industry often do the same things for all their client companies, which does not help you to stand out in search results - on the contrary.
If you choose a larger company as a partner, find out about the experience of the people working on your project rather than the project manager and, if desired, the time they have spent in the company.
To recap, we have listed all the factors that affect the price of search engine optimization:
The initial condition of the website, i.e. the need for technical search engine optimization
Page contents, i.e. the need for internal search engine optimization
Linking, i.e. the need for external search engine optimization
The size or complexity of the website
The partner's pricing model
The amount
The main topic of this article is the price of search engine optimization - what it consists of, how much one should pay for it, and what should be considered before purchasing services. Search engine optimization helps potential customers find your business through organic search results at any time of the day, from anywhere in the world. The higher you rank on the results pages, the more clicks and traffic your website receives. This is the aim of search engine optimization or SEO.
In addition to the amount of web traffic, the purpose of search engine optimization is to increase its quality, which helps to achieve the ultimate goal of optimization; increasing sales. Because search engine optimization improves the user experience of the website, customers are also more likely to become repeat buyers.
It sounds nice, but at this point, of course, the question arises, how much does this pleasure cost and what does the price of search engine optimization consist of? Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this, as the price of search engine optimization varies depending on the goals of the company, the condition of the website, and the provider.
Whether you are a local entrepreneur or an online merchant, after reading this article, you will know all the factors that affect the price of search engine optimization and what kind of costs you can expect for your case.
Why should a company invest in search engine optimization?
Let's start by telling why it is generally worth investing in search engine optimization. As we mentioned above, search engine optimization helps increase website traffic and brand awareness through organic or non-paid search results.
Search engine optimization is a very cost-effective marketing method, as while your competitors spend fortunes on paid web traffic, you can get quality web traffic to your site without paying for it directly.
You can still buy advertising space and thus further enhance sales, but if your budget is tight, you should definitely start marketing your business with search engine optimization of your website. This is due to a couple of things.
Search engine optimization improves your site's visibility and customer experience
Firstly, search engine optimization has a positive impact on the user experience of the site. Succeeding in the user experience is an essential part of succeeding in e-commerce, as if your own website is even slightly slow, clumsy, or in some other way annoying to use, the potential customer will not see it worthwhile and simply leaves the site.
Your competitor with better websites will thank you for all the trades you give him practically.
Secondly, search engine optimization affects how well paid advertising, and especially Google ads, work. Google indeed examines the technical features of websites when determining their search rankings, as it too wants to offer visitors the best possible user experience. (And if your potential customer doesn't get it, you won't make trades again.)
At this point, website loading speed becomes a special focus of examination, but other site features, such as structure, linking, content, and code also have an effect on how user-friendly search engines and customers consider your website.
All of these things are what search engine optimization aims to improve.
Why isn't the price of search engine optimization listed anywhere?
The aforementioned aspects are therefore areas of search engine optimization that are polished to prime condition during optimization.
What interventions need to be done to improve the condition of the site and achieve the goals of search engine optimization depends on the initial state of your website. In practice, your site's condition could be anything from poor, really bad, great, "just okay", to good, but with some room for improvement.
This is why it is almost impossible to set a fixed price for search engine optimization that would be the same for everyone.
What does search engine optimization typically cost?
The price of search engine optimization varies. However, it is usually about thousands of euros, and depending on the provider, the price can be significantly lower or higher. It's a good idea to compare search engine optimization prices when looking for the right partner for yourself.
When planning your marketing budget, keep in mind that choosing the cheapest option can turn out to be expensive later when poorly executed search engine optimization does not bring the desired results and the interventions that have already been carried out have to be corrected again by another expert.
Therefore, it is particularly important to choose a professional partner who knows their business for sure. (You can find more tips on how to choose the right actor for you at the end of this article.)
Because search terms and the criteria set by search engines also change constantly, search engine optimization does not become ready at once. Search engine optimization should be continuously developed so that customers would find their way to your website now and in the future. The best approach is to consider search engine optimization as a monthly investment that lays a strong foundation for all other marketing.
In addition, there are different pricing models for search engine optimization.
At Growly, we want to deliver the best possible results to our customers, so the price of our search engine optimization is based on how much time our experts have to spend on it. The price of search engine optimization done by Growly varies depending on the needs and goals of the company with us between a few hundred and thousands, always according to the customer's budget and as agreed in advance.
Because it is part of our mission to help businesses of all sizes grow, including small ones, we mention here that we currently offer search engine optimization at a promotional price of as low as 329 € - 699 € / month.
The best way to find out the exact price is to book an appointment with us or another industry company for a survey. But if you want to get a bit of a clue about what optimization might cost in your case, keep reading. Next, we will go through the factors that affect the final price of search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization price - Factors that determine the price of optimization
The price of search engine optimization depends on the type of work your website needs to increase visibility.
In order to get the most out of the marketing budget, the search engine optimization expert customizes the services according to the company's goals and the strategy aimed at achieving them, as well as the website being optimized.
All sites are different, but the following services and issues are what make the biggest difference in search engine optimization pricing:
Technical search engine optimization
The initial state of the website
Search engine algorithms and the criteria set for websites are constantly updated, meaning what worked on websites a few years ago may not work today.
In addition to search engine optimization, every webpage must meet certain basic criteria, which, however, many companies still do not meet. Examples include a website loading speed of less than two seconds, scalability for mobile devices, optimized structure, and seamless user experience.
If your website’s technical condition is in need of an update, you can expect the price of search engine optimization to be at the higher end. In that case, the site undergoes technical search engine optimization, which, as its name implies, covers all technical aspects of the site.
The main goal of tweaking the technology is, of course, to improve the user experience. This is done so that Google would classify your site as recommendable and visitors would actually do what you want them to do on the site, such as making a purchase or contacting your company.
If the webpages are really in poor condition, it is often faster and cheaper to renew the site completely.
If the technology of your web pages is already in order and your search engine rankings are already good, maintaining and improving that situation will cost less than starting work from scratch.
Keyword research
Keyword research helps to find out what search terms your target audience types into search engines when looking for companies like yours and the products or services they offer.
Based on the keywords, the content of the web pages is optimized so that your site appears in search results that include those keywords. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the exact keywords and key phrases that your potential customers use and to create content that matches these searches.
At the same time, the search engine optimizer checks the competitive situation of the search terms and analyses which keywords or terms can be used to improve the search engine visibility of your site most effectively. Thorough keyword research is therefore the basis of all search engine optimization.
Often during a professional keyword research, it also turns out that the company's website does not receive traffic with the same search terms as the entrepreneur might have thought or planned.
For these reasons, keyword research is invariably done with every search engine optimization.
Internal search engine optimization
The content of web pages
The amount and quality of content on an existing website affect how much search engine optimization will cost you. And contrary to popular belief, internal search engine optimization involves much more than just adding keywords to the text.
Such things as optimizing images and videos, titling pages, internal linking, and reviewing the site for conflicting or missing meta information and other content (as these affect search engine rankings negatively), are all part of internal search engine optimization.
You can certainly produce some of the web content yourself, such as texts, but then you cannot be fully certain that this area of search engine optimization has been done correctly.
We at Growly can also guide and help our customers with ongoing content optimization, for example, every time the website is updated, but even then the search engine ranking of the content on the site is up to Google.
External search engine optimization
Backlinks to the site
Backlinks have long been one of the most important factors that search engines use in determining the search rankings of web pages.
The higher quality your backlinks are, the higher your site will also appear in search results containing desired keywords. This is because quality backlinks tell Google and other search engines that your website is, for example, reliable and relevant.
Because building backlinks can take some time, this task also contributes to the final price of search engine optimization.
The amount and level of competition
Since you are competing for search engine rankings with other companies in your industry, the amount of competition may affect the price of search engine optimization, depending on the situation.
At the beginning of search engine optimization, background research on your competitors should be done and taken into account how often they publish quality content, how much of it is already ready, and how well your competitors have committed to their target audience.
The answers to these questions can either make it easier or harder to increase the visibility of your own website, as if the level of your competitors is high, the goal of your website's search engine optimization will be to achieve the same situation and ideally exceed it (which may not be an easy task).
If, on the contrary, the level is weak, you will be able to achieve a higher place in organic search results and increase brand awareness faster than usual.
The size of the website
In order for organic visibility in search engines to grow in the long term and web traffic to the site to increase as intended, search engine optimization should focus on the entire website and not just parts of it or only half of all pages.
This means that the larger your website is, the more likely it is to require more man-hours and increase the cost of search engine optimization.
In addition to performing search engine optimization, planning and research also take time.
For example, creating a comprehensive action plan and checking which pages need to be updated during search engine optimization takes more or less time depending on the size of the website.
Goals and planning of search engine optimization
Because well planned is half done, some time should also be spent on planning search engine optimization.
The planning work begins at the start of cooperation by mapping out the goals of the search engine optimization to be performed and the means by which the goals are achieved within the client's budget. The more grandiose the goals are, the more actions need to be taken for them and naturally, this affects the price of search engine optimization.
Based on the needs and goals of the client company, a search engine optimization plan is drawn up. In order to make search engine optimization as effective as possible, the partner doing the optimization should also spend time getting acquainted with the client's business.
The practical implementation of search engine optimization begins with defining the keywords that support the client's business. These can also be brainstormed together with the client. After this, the search engine optimizer performs extensive keyword research, which serves as the basis for the optimization to be performed.
If a proper plan is not made at the beginning of the operation, the entrepreneur may well wake up to the fact that the original price of search engine optimization has skyrocketed during the process, because all the necessary interventions were not taken into account.
Of course, no one wants to end up in this situation, and that's why the professional search engine optimizer should be able to plan and organize the whole process from start to finish before starting the actual optimization. To avoid adjustments and misunderstandings, it's also important that communication between the client and the maker works well. That's why it's especially important to choose a capable and personally compatible creator for search engine optimization, not necessarily the cheapest one.
Results analysis and development
Results analysis and development are part of search engine optimization whenever you have outsourced the maintenance and continuous optimization of the website to a partner.
Without data analysis and results development, it is not possible to achieve long-term results in search engine optimization. Only by regularly monitoring analytics can we understand what results the search engine optimization provides you with and how those results can be improved.
Based on the data, decisions are made about new actions aimed at increasing website traffic and conversions (which can be, for example, sales or contacts) further.
If you leave the data unused, you can never know which actions work on your website and which do not, i.e., where it is not worth spending more time and money. In other words, the fact that your partner spends time analyzing data from your website will save you search engine optimization costs in the long run and improve the results obtained from it.
How to choose the right provider for search engine optimization?
Now that you know all the things that affect the price of search engine optimization, you might be wondering how you can choose the right partner for yourself.
Choosing the right service provider is especially important, as errors due to lack of expertise, lack of planning, and lack of communication often have to be paid for out of the entrepreneur's own pocket.
In addition to a marketing agency, you can seek help from a skilled freelancer or consultant in search engine optimization. In this case, remember to properly clarify the skills and services included in their package.
You may not get all the search engine optimization services you would get from marketing agencies from a freelancer. You can always hire several freelancers skilled in different areas of marketing, but then you also get to take on the role of project manager.
If you choose to seek help from a consultant, first find out if search engine optimization is included in the price or if you have to do it yourself, and in this case, whether you have to pay separately for each piece of advice in addition to the initial consultation. Often a consultant is happy to take care of website optimization, but if the latter is the case, you may end up paying more for advice than for search engine optimization performed by a reputable marketing agency.
Tips for those considering search engine optimization services
We give you a few more tips at the end that entrepreneurs should keep in mind when looking for or choosing a search engine optimization provider:
Does the service provider have references and proof of expertise, such as customer cases and reviews? Make sure they are available or ask about experience if references seem inadequate.
Is communication with the partner smooth? If misunderstandings seem to recur from the start or for some reason you don't trust the operator, consider changing the provider before things go further.
Are both parties definitely aware of what part of the search engine optimization is the provider's responsibility and what do you possibly want to do yourself? Ensure that these issues are addressed in, for example, the request for proposal or the assignment contract.
Be cautious of any operators who claim that search engine optimization or any other marketing action is a quick fix to every problem in your business and promise results in a suspiciously short time or for a small amount.
Beware of large advertising agencies with constantly changing staff. The results of search engine optimization can stagnate or even suffer if the person performing it is constantly changing and your business has to be reacquainted with over and over again.
However, remember that you do not need a search engine optimizer specialized in your exact industry. This is because those specialized in a certain industry often do the same things for all their client companies, which does not help you to stand out in search results - on the contrary.
If you choose a larger company as a partner, find out about the experience of the people working on your project rather than the project manager and, if desired, the time they have spent in the company.
To recap, we have listed all the factors that affect the price of search engine optimization:
The initial condition of the website, i.e. the need for technical search engine optimization
Page contents, i.e. the need for internal search engine optimization
Linking, i.e. the need for external search engine optimization
The size or complexity of the website
The partner's pricing model
The amount