How Much Does SEO Cost in 2022?

With over 5.6 billion searches on Google every day, it is essential to make sure your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is up to scratch, and users can find your website.

But just how much does SEO cost?

Finding an exact SEO price can be complicated. There are so many different pricing models and services available, some of which you may not yet be ready to use.

Due to this complexity, many small businesses often avoid SEO altogether and to their detriment. SEO is a requirement of any website online. After all, if no one can find you, is it even worth having a website?

This article will look into the average cost of SEO services and how to find the best people to help you reach your goals. Keep reading to find out just how much does SEO cost?

What Effects The Final Price?

Usually, four main factors will help you budget your SEO costs throughout the year. They are services required, project scale, expertise, and pricing models.

Services required will be different for everybody; the more you need, the greater your overall expense. You need to be careful that you are not paying for services that you don’t need, as some less reputable agencies may try and add these to your final bill.

Project scale looks at how far you need your message to travel. International SEO that reaches people globally will cost much more than something targeting a local audience.

Expertise touches on the person or people doing the work. If you have in-house experience, you can save money as long as they have the correct skillset. Otherwise, you need to look to hire an agency or a freelancer, which will impact your costs.

Pricing models come into play when you hire external talent, and they offer you a variety of ways to pay for your service. We will dive into this part deeper in the next section.

Pricing Models

Hiring an agency to do your SEO can be a brilliant step as they will have more expertise and experience under one roof than you may be able to recruit into your business.

However, there are so many different agencies that you may become overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of choice regarding services and pricing models.

Each agency or a freelance consultant will offer their own charging structure, so you need to be sure that you get exactly what you want before you sign on the dotted line.

Let’s look at the main pricing plans.

Per Hour

You may see this method favored by SEO freelance consultants as it is the fairest way for them to share their time with several clients. They will charge you based on how many hours they spent working on a project. Usually, you pay them on a weekly basis.

You need to be sure that you ask for a clear breakdown of the hours outlining what work they have done to ensure they are billing you correctly. On average, an SEO freelancer will charge between $100 and $250 per hour.

Per Month

Bigger SEO agencies will charge you on a monthly basis, often in the form of a retaining fee for their services. They will then agree on a set range of services that they will carry out on your site each month. Often these services come in the form of a package, but you may be able to agree to a custom deal.

Monthly retainers will cost you around $10,000 a month, depending on the scale of your website and the reach of your message.

Per Project

Some agencies may offer a per-project pricing option that will allow you to choose a specific area to focus on, such as link building or on-site SEO fixes.

This will be a one-off cost that will very much depend on the scale of the project. So it could be anything from $1000 to $1 million only the agency themselves will be able to advise. Make sure you have everything clearly in writing first and some firm Key Performance Indicators to measure success.

SEO Services

When choosing your pricing plan, it is essential to understand what SEO services are important to you, which will significantly impact SEO spending.

So what kind of services should you focus on?

A good SEO agency should, as a standard, offer you an SEO audit of your site as a one-off expense. Usually, these cost around $250, depending on the size of your website.

With this report, you will see where all the problem areas with your SEO lie and start to build your SEO budget. An agency should then give you an idea of the critical areas you need to target to improve your SEO.

If you are just starting to work on your SEO, here are some key areas you may need to fix.

On-Site SEO

One-Site SEO looks at problems on your websites, such as poor content, duplication of content, broken links, poor keyword optimizations, and page speed. Many more elements fall under this category that should be outlined in any decent site audit.

Link Building & Outreach

This is the work required to make other sites link back to your content, a metric by which Google and other search engines will measure your worth. Poor quality or too few links will result in a terrible ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages.

SEO Monitoring and Reporting

An agency or consultant worth their salt will also offer an option to provide you with monthly updates and reports on your site progress. These reports could involve page rankings, site rankings, the number of links built, and other vital metrics. You will need reports to be able to track your progress, so this is an essential service.