This question or ‘how often do I need to do link building for? is usually one of the first questions we are asked by a client thinking about organic search engine optimisation.

In terms of how many plans a client would need to commit to, the honest answer is that it depends how competitive their sector is online.  All you have to do is out-perform your online competitors.  If your competitors have many good quality links  you will need to create more than if they have very few.

By way of example and with his permission,  I copy below the competitor analysis results  I did recently for a good friend of ours, Duane Lacey of Optimum Resource Group, for the keyword phrase ‘sales lead generation in Brighton’.  This shows the various search engine criteria and compares each of the websites presently on page one of the Google UK results for this keyword phrase – His site is in 5^th & 6^th place!!:

(Click On Image to View full size)

Going from left to right:

• DA – The age of the domain
• PR – the PageRank of the listed web page – PageRank is Google’s authority ranking scale based on thwe quality and relevancy of the page to the keyword phrase.  The  scale goes from 0-10 with 10 being best.
• IC – Indexed content i.e. number of indexed pages in the website
• RDD – the number of referring domains i.e. other websites linking to your website
• RDP – The number of referring domains to the listed page.
• BLP / BLD – the number of back-links to the listed page / entire domain
• BLEG – back-links from Government or educational establishments – rare but valuable for SEO
• DMZ / YAH – 2 influential business directories, DMOZ and Yahoo.  Google likes these as there is a quality assessment prior to being accepted for listing.

The last 4 columns relate to ‘on-page’ factors – Is the keyword phrase  used in the:

• Page Title
• Page URL
• Page Description
• Page Header

On- Page factors count for about 30% of the Google algorithm.

Back-link quality and the authority of the linking domain is more important than the number of links.

The site at the top of Google UK for this keyword phrase, www.qualifa.co.uk is a new site ( under 1 year old) and only has 42 referring domains (Optimum Resource Group (ORG) have 150) giving a total of 272 backlinks (ORG have 1,159) – so why are www.qualifa.co.uk top??

I copy below their link profile:

(Again click on the image to view full size)

Google only recognises 8 of their links as being relevant (the others are of no value for SEO on Google) and of these one is from a PR 0 (no authority website) – again of no value.  Their ‘counting’ links for SEO are:

• 5 x PR 2 links
• 1 x PR 3 link
• 1 x PR 4 link

The higher the PR of the giving link the better.  One PR 4 link is worth many times a PR 1 link for SEO-  a PR 5 link is worth much more than a PR 4 and so on..

I then looked at the ORG link profile:

(Click on Image to View Full Size)

As you can see none of the ORG links are recognised by Google for SEO – which is why the other website is above them in Google.

This at least tells them what they need to do to get to the top of Google for this phrase though – they need to build at least one more link from each PR (1 – 10) domain than their competitors.  So I can now tell them with some confidence that they would only need to do one of our effective Link Building plans once to be ahead of their competitors for this keyword phrase.  If the site in 1^st place had thousands of counting links more aggressive link building and a bigger budget would be required

Hopefully this helps to answer the original question asked – How much does effective SEO cost?  We can provide you with a similar detailed analysis for your primary keyword phrases so you know exactly what budget you need to advance up the Google rankings for just £145 +VAT.

If you would like to know more please leave a comment below or visit GB Web Marketing – Professional Internet Marketing Services for Business in Surrey, Kent & Sussex.