How Much Does SEO Cost? Explore SEO Pricing Models

Per Hour SEO Cost

How much does seo cost you hourly?

You might find an hourly rate charged by freelancers or independent contractors offering SEO services to smaller clients. But the per hour SEO cost model is less likely preferred by agencies or online marketing companies. It is a model where SEO services cost you on how many hours are needed to be invested on a particular project. On average, with this per hr. Model SEO costs between $100 to $250 per hour. 

• Hourly rate for SEO agencies is $100-$150/hour. 
• Hourly rate for SEO freelancers is around  $41–50/hour.
• Hourly rate For SEO consultants is about $75-$100/hour.

Per Month SEO Cost

How much does seo cost you monthly?

Larger SEO and marketing agencies commonly prefer to charge a fixed price monthly as their service fee. They often come with different monthly SEO packages with specific sets of services, such as Keyword research, competitor research, SEO content writing, technical audits, content marketing audits, link building, digital PR, and more. Some agencies offer custom SEO plans that allow you to choose SEO services with an agreed monthly price..

On average, SEO cost for a monthly retainer is around $10,000 per month. 

Per Project Model

How much does seo cost you per project?

If we talk about per project SEO cost, it is the pricing model where SEO companies/agencies charge a one-off fee for a particular SEO project. In this scenario, agencies discuss your project SEO needs and goals then finalize a mutually agreeing total cost. This per-project SEO cost model allows more customization in SEO services.

If we talk about numbers, SEO cost per project depends on project and organization size and requirements. For small companies, it may cost around $1,000 a month per project, whereas the range goes to millions of dollars a month for larger, enterprise-level companies.

On average, SEO cost per project may range between  $1,000 to $1 million and up.

DIY SEO

DIY  SEO is nothing but the SEO practiced by yourself where all the SEO activities from market study, keyword research, making SEO strategies and so on, are practiced by yourself without any external help.If you are a solopreneur with a cash-strapped business, it could be your reasonable choice. But it's not that easy, because you need to put in the time, efforts. 

Elements like market study, keyword research, content creation, on page and off optimization are time consuming and all need to be done cautiously for best results. Moreover, you have to deal greatly with technical aspects of analytics, link building, and all. 

Since, you are doing SEO yourself, it's FREE but absolutely Time Consuming!

Cheap SEO : Average SEO Cost?

Here from cheap SEO, we mean economic SEO services for low budget small firms. There are few agencies out in the market with very low cost SEO services. But if it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, why do these agencies give great relaxation in charges? Reason could be anything like- they may want to establish themselves in the market or want to reach a huge low budget client. Here our agenda to discuss this scenario is to alert you to being very cautious while owning any of such cheap SEO services. Regularly optimize results if their services work for your business? Are they able to drive potential traffic of leads?

Average SEO Cost For Cheap SEO: $200 to $500 a month

Mid-range SEO : Average SEO Cost?

Mid-range SEO services are quite safer than the ones that we discussed above. Mid-level SEO mainly focuses on fixing a website’s existing problems, such as optimizing site architecture and adapting SEO content strategies.  Their content strategy is more focused on producing new content regularly, updating existing content, and striving to build authority with digital PR service, building backlinks through outreach and social amplification.

These Mid-range SEO services can definitely help you but only up to a certain extent, with a little more budget, you can leverage real SEO benefits.

Average SEO Cost For Mid-range SEO:  $5,000 to $10,000 a month or per project

High-end SEO : Average SEO Cost?

From High-end SEO services, we are talking about services that have taken place under the guidance of SEO specialists with well curated infrastructure and expertise to offer a comprehensive service at every stage of the process. They deliver best practices to improve your SEO, including services- delivering premium content services, fixing technical SEO problems, optimizing your analytical tools, or resolving the impact of Google penalties and much more. Moreover, High-end SEO providers are usually well established and trustworthy, but don’t forget to check, can they deliver everything they promise over a period.

Average SEO Cost For High-end SEO: $15,000-$30,000 per month

Enterprise SEO :  Average SEO Cost?

Enterprise SEO is our final and the most premium category of SEO services, as enterprise SEO is known for its accountability. If you are one, who is looking to scale up your small business, looking for more traffic, more conversions, and more input from stakeholders, Enterprise SEO is the right choice for you. They committed to deliver services with a full-funnel strategy for long lasting results. But we want to mention, for this kind of service, you have to lose your pocket with some big bugs. 

Average SEO Cost For Enterprise SEO:  $30k-1 million and up a month. 

Well, in the end, we’d like to suggest to you that whether to go with any of these categories, you should always do your due diligence and check out the agency’s credentials, and after owning services make a regular check on their performance to ensure if they are able to deliver promised & desired results or not.

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1. Competitor & Market Research: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

For entering a competitive market and leveraging the power of SEO, you must have a great understanding of the market competitor, your competitors’s approach. This will also help you get to know your potential audiences and what could be the best way to reach them. An in-depth research on market competitors can uncover potential hidden opportunities that you may not see otherwise.

Now coming to the incurring SEO cost on market/competitor study,  you may need to invest in some SEO tools to get an in-depth market study. While some of this research can be done in-house, using some SEO tools to get an in-depth competitor analysis/market status, consulting SEO professionals would be the right choice, they can help you through other elements of SEO as well. 

2. Keyword research: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

SEO is all about keywords, keyword research is the very first and one of the most crucial steps in SEO practices. Keyword research is time consuming, and most critical for your business success. It involves identifying what are high ranking keywords on which your competitors are driving traffic to their sites. And what are the keywords most often used by your potential customers.

Now come to the SEO cost for keyword research, although there are various tools out there for keyword research and are totally free. But as they are free, they deliver services with certain limitations, whereas few other paid tools can help you gain your competitor keyword stock as well.

For example Google’s Keyword Planner facilitates keyword research for free, but for more comprehensive research, a paid tool like Ahrefs is the right choice. Paying for tools can quickly mount up, so you can take services from an SEO agency to take care of everything in one package.

Here Are The Best keyword research tools

3. Site Optimization: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

One of the major factors that decide your SEO ranking is the user experience that your site delivers. So, site optimization ensures that your site is user-friendly and delivers a great user experience with no missing links or slow-loading images. For site optimization, you need an SEO professional, who knows all the tricks, such as minimizing the number of clicks from the home page, building a strong link-building strategy, keeping URLs short, and so on.

Again, an SEO agency that specializes in site optimization with the best digital marketing strategies (like JanBask Digital Design) will include a complete site optimization strategy (including both on/off page) in your package.

4. Content creation and optimization: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

Real fuel for SEO success is the high quality, well optimized content that adds value to your customer. For better organic ranking and improving SEO, a website needs high-quality and as you might not have that great writing skills or time to invest in, you again need to outsource a content writer to get the job done for you. 

5. Link Building Strategies: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

Link building is the practice of building “backlinks” to a website with the goal of improving domain authority and more search engine visibility. It is one of the most important ranking factors for Google, other than SEO & content optimization. Link building is an important part of SEO services because it helps search engines discover new web pages and improve SEO ranking.

Link building is a very activity of SEO, can be done well only by Offpage SEO experts, and this also you get covered under SEO package when you outsource service from any well established digital agency.

6. Analytics & Reporting: SEO Cost Affecting Factors

Analytics plays an important role in SEO, helping to understand whether your website is performing optimally for search, what is generating traffic and what isn't and where to invest your time and money for best results.

Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to track user behaviour on your site. Keeping up with Google analytics best practices is also necessary to stay on top of your site’s performance and the competition but for that you must need to have required technical skills. So, we recommend you to own digital marketing services, where SEO professionals  can help you with complete analytics and reporting to help get a better understanding of your site performance.

So, above listed all these factors, would certainly add an SEO cost, that you have to invest in, whether in required paid tools or hiring/outsourcing SEO services for any good Digital Marketing Agency.