SEO - What should it cost

Posted by admin on August 11, 2014

SEO - What should it cost.

Many businesses are constantly targeted by would be SEO Guru's either by mass emails or direct from their web site. Many of these make promises to get your site to page one faster than Super Man. But how can they make this promise? In reality they cant guarantee to deliver on this promise. Just google SEO Perth for example. If SEO companies practice what they sell then they would all be number one on page one, and as we no this is not possible. At best they can be in the top ten for organic search results which would place them on page one. So should you pay for SEO?

seo-pic.jpg

FREE - Self managed SEO.

As the owner or manager of your business, you will know what search terms are important for you to rank well in. With a few free tools and a few minutes each month you can quickly and easily optimise your site to do well in these. Most Content Management Systems (CMS) will have tools to help with this. Concrete 5 has this built into the core and also offers some add ons to further enhance this.

Paid - Small SEO business, usually just one person.

They have the advantage of offering personal service. The person you talk to is the person that does the work. They should have lower overheads and can offer competitive prices. They usually do not target you with high pressure marketing.

Large SEO Company

As with all businesses, there is good and bad. They can target you with various marketing techniques and may be located overseas. They may have flash offices and large overheads. Some may promise amazing results or want to lock you into long term contracts. Some may also want you to update you web site to their preferred CMS, they may then control your hosting, content and SEO. This can then make it difficult to change companies or even take over the SEO yourself. They may even insist that you use paid advertising to help with your results.

What Should you do?

Start with analysing your site. Look at the statistics, how are people finding you now? What search terms are you under performing in. Do a web search on SEO, there are many guides written by successful people and many free tools to help you. with these you will soon discover that good SEO is like good service. Provide the right page titles, descriptions and key words along with relevant content and you will do well. Search engines all want to be number one. so they want their results to provide the correct result from the search. Trying to be on page one for something that you don't really offer will not work in the long term.

If you find that the searches you want to do well in are very competitive with a large number of results and you don't seem to be improving, you could then look at paying for your SEO or using paid advertising. Just remember that good results take time. Don't get locked into long contracts for SEO or paid ads.