If you want to succeed with your website, you need to decide how much you will spend on search engine optimization (SEO).

As SEO is a must if you are to survive the fierce online competition, the question is not “should I invest in SEO” but “how much should I invest in SEO”.  SEO can be very expensive so in this post we are going to give you some idea of what you should expect to pay for SEO services in the UK and what you should expect for that investment.

How much do SEO Companies Charge?

If you decide to hire an SEO agency, such as GB Web Marketing, they will have several pricing models for you to choose from:

1. Hourly consulting: the average SEO agency (or individual) charges between £75 and £250 per hour.

2. Fixed prices: businesses that are new to SEO often buy services at fixed prices. This can be a website content audit (usually £350 – £5,000), link profile audit (£500-£5,000) or SEO copywriting (average cost around £80 – £100 per page).

3. Monthly retainer: the most popular pricing model is a monthly payment. On average, SEO agencies charge £500- £3,500 per month, dependent on the size and complexity of the website and how competitive your sector is online.

Depending on how much you pay, you can expect different services:

• regular analytics reports
• on-site optimisation
• content marketing, including blogs, videos, press releases etc.
• Link building via content creation
• keyword research
• Content optimisation and analysis

Some offshore companies offer ‘SEO’ services for much lower prices ($100-$500/month).  In general, you can be sure that these services use spam techniques to ‘promote’ your website and that these services will backfire on you and are likely to do more harm than good in the long term.

Effective SEO requires hard work, a regular flow of good quality content and keeping watch on things like duplicate content and crawl errors via Google Webmaster Tools.  This all takes time, knowledge and expertise.  If an SEO service is too cheap, it’s likely that they use risky methods. That’s a hard lesson that many businesses have learned in the recent past.

In our next post we will look at how you can get more for your money.

If you are keen to know now, or would like more information please get in touch by leaving a comment below or by using the contact form.