A common question for an SEO company – how much does SEO cost?
SEOmoz ran a survey in December asking their SEO consultant and SEO agency readers for pricing-model and cost-structure information. With over 600 responses, the data is quite interesting.
Here are Rand Fishkin’s Top 9 Takeaways from the results:
- Hourly SEO Costs Vary Across Countries, but $76-$200/hour is Most Common
- By-the-Project SEO Pricing is Popular and Most Commonly $1,000-$7,500
- Monthly Retainer Pricing Has the Widest Distribution
- The Death of Hands-On SEO Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
- Inbound/Organic > Pure SEO (i.e. broader “inbound marketing” services firms offer SEO, social, content, conversion, analytics, etc)
- Web Design/Development Agencies do a Lot of SEO
- Employees:Clients/Month Ratio is Between 1-2
- Vast Majority of Consultants Service Small-Medium Businesses
- Though Project-Based Pricing is Most Popular, the Majority of Consultancies Also Offer Monthly Retainers and Hourly Rates
It’s great to get a look at the issue of SEO pricing which is usually kept quite close to the chest. There’s some good data in there, but it still doesn’t address things like “total spend per campaign” (which is difficult to figure for ongoing services), nor does it look at return on investment for the client. The stats for “percent-of-growth-based pricing” are interesting.
If you’re currently paying for SEO please leave a comment with some information on how much you’re paying and what service you are receiving (you can leave an anonymous comment on the blog post). Equally, if you’re an SEO provider, we’d love to hear what you charge and what you provide for that cost.
Infographic by SEOmoz & AYTM Market Research. Click here for the full report.
I was paying $1,000 per month to an SEO girl but after a year couldn’t really justify it because it was too hard to track the results.
Result tracing is becoming more and more detailed. Thanks for that.. By the way, 1000$ sounds cheap!
“You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
We just got a quote for SEO for our site. We are a small business and they quoted $7500/month with a 12-month commitment. So approximately $100k per year. Seems a bit steep, but they are doing content generation as well since that is our main problem.
We pay around 750$ every month, which is a lot on a small budget like ours. But at least until we can do the SEO ourselfs, the money is well spent.
I own a small business, and I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for something you can do yourself if you do a bit of research. I’m not saying you will become a pro overnight by no means, at least you will know a little bit about what is going on with your site when or if you do outsource this task. The only reason why this would make sense is if your were extremely busy working 70+ hours a week and you simply did not have time to invest into your business, which then it makes sense.