Why Does SEO Cost So Much

SEO is an investment and a marketing strategy that is all but essential for the success of any online marketing campaign.

Of course, being as effective as it is, some costs are involved when implementing this long-term strategy into your marketing campaign. These costs eventually rack up, which can make SEO seem quite expensive.

So, what makes SEO so expensive? Unfortunately, the answer is not straightforward. The number of variables involved, along with the continuous evolution of search engines, affect SEO cost. As such, the total cost can fluctuate quite significantly.

Let’s take a closer look at what affects SEO pricing, the time and expertise needed, and the potential benefits to reap from it.

What Affects The Cost Of SEO

Many factors affect the cost of SEO, owing to the extensive list of tasks and optimisation techniques to handle. From keyword research to link-building and backlink creation, the number of tasks to keep track of requires a high level of expertise and time investment.

Let’s explore some of these cost factors to understand what can cause your SEO costs to fluctuate heavily.

1. Keyword Research

keywords are critical to SEO, as they directly affect organic search visibility. As such, one of the first steps in SEO is identifying the most optimal keywords for website content.

This task includes search volume analysis, competitor analysis, and understanding user intent. Doing so yields target keywords that fit the queries made by the target audience, the client’s business goals, and how to effectively reach people.

2. Premium Content Creation

As a search engine, Google prioritises high-quality content over content that forces keywords in, which makes good content writing valuable for a new website. The cost of engaging in effective content marketing can vary based on the writer’s experience, the length of the content, and the research required for articles.

3. Comprehensive Press Release

When local businesses make an important announcement online, the page must quickly be visible to the target audience. For this, the SEO strategy may involve the following:

• Optimising the written content
• Distributing it to relevant news and blogging outlets
• Other SEO services like media reporting and monitoring.

4. On-Page And Off-Page Optimisation

There are two aspects of page optimisation: on-page and off-page optimisation. Both aspects affect the site’s ranking on the search engine results page, with on-page optimisation also boosting the web page visibility.

For on-page optimisation, the cost varies based on keyword optimisation, internal linking, meta descriptions and URL structure. SEO prices depend on link building, influencer outreach, social media marketing, reputation management, website authority, and credibility improvements for off-page optimisation.

5. High Domain Authority Backlinks

Getting high domain authority (DA) backlinks is crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, which is why it is a significant cost factor. This can involve analysing competitors, contacting authoritative websites, and using sponsored content to build a better library of backlinks.

6. Website Speed And UX

A poorly designed website is destined for failure, so it’s wise to invest in speeding up the load times for a website. Plus, the user experience plays a major role in retaining visitors, directly affecting Google search rankings and visibility.

The major costs for these improvements include SEO audit, web hosting improvements, code or image optimisation, caching or compression techniques, usability tests, complete link clean-ups, link audits, responsiveness improvements, etc.

7. Website Analytics And Tracking

Analytics provide essential insights into a website’s performance, making time and effort an important investment. The SEO costs involved in analytics and tracking include implementing and configuring analytics tools, setting up conversion tracking, and using data analysis and performance monitoring tools.

Why Is SEO Expensive?

With a plethora of cost factors involved, it’s natural to wonder why SEO can cost so much. The answer to this conundrum is three-fold: the required time investment, setup and maintenance, and expertise.

SEO requires patience with the strategy and a longer period of observation of the market. Without much SEO effort, the digital marketing strategy may not be as effective as desired.

In addition, the amount of resources and hard work necessary to make SEO effective is a major factor in determining the required money investment. The work done for effective SEO is near-constant and must be sustained for the desired results.

Lastly, The reason the marketing tactic relies on the experience of the SEO expert with various tactics who has worked to create an organic strategy and implement it successfully. The expertise of working to outperform the competition demands fair remuneration, after all.

Let’s examine each of these three reasons and answer the question in greater detail.

1. The Required Time Investment

SEO is a long-term strategic effort that runs for an extended period, lasting up to a year on average, to create a sustainable framework to build. This run ensures you benefit from the information and setup after the SEO campaign ends.

Each aspect of an SEO campaign requires at least some time to display results, from UX optimisations to visibility improvements. And other extensive aspects of the campaign, such as search ranking improvements, require months to be effective.

Combined with other strategies, your website’s presence gradually expands in the local search results. Furthermore, SEO agencies take time to research their clients, ensuring they can identify which strategies have been found to be the most effective. As such, you can expect that good SEO involves companies creating a personalised campaign, even if it takes some time.

It’s important to note that despite the time and resources you will spend, SEO is one of the most effective ways of building your online presence with a long-term strategy. This brings us to the point where the lengthier campaign ultimately becomes more lucrative for your business.

2. Work And Maintenance Required

The extensive list of factors we charge for may have given you a brief overview of how much work goes into an SEO campaign. Such campaigns require plenty of work to make them successful and steadily growing, so they tend to be expensive.

With dozens of moving parts, optimisations and maintenance requirements, SEO strategies usually require plenty of work. This is especially true for the first few weeks of the campaign when all the research must be done for the business.

An SEO specialist must consider well over 200 elements. Naturally, this will become a time-consuming process and consequently quite expensive.

Additionally, SEO specialists need to keep up with the algorithm changes, keep pace with white hat SEO techniques and evolve their methodology for websites.

This ensures they continue using ethical but impactful practices for their digital marketing efforts without indulging in black hat SEO techniques.

3. The Required Expertise

SEO is a complicated and ever-evolving field that takes time and requires plenty of knowledge and expertise to succeed online.

High-quality SEO work is expensive because of the amount of time SEO companies have to invest in learning and researching the algorithm. As Google’s algorithm shifts, it adapts and changes accordingly, which can be quite difficult for newcomers.

Thus, when it comes to SEO, and you pay a high amount for work, it can be indicative of the expertise of the SEO agency. You can be assured that the work being done behind the scenes to yield results is well worth the price of admission.

Long-Term Benefits Of SEO

Google searches are being made constantly, which makes the cost of SEO services justifiable by the short-term value alone. However, a short-term boost to SEO ranking isn’t the only way your business can benefit from the marketing strategy.

By choosing to invest in SEO with a comprehensive package, your website will continue to reap the campaign’s benefits for the foreseeable future. It does so by attracting new visitors and building up the existing audience across different categories, encouraging them to post and share this article.

1. Attracting New Visitors

As your website continues to gain traction in search engine rankings, the likelihood of it attracting new visitors increases exponentially. Each time you adjust your SEO strategy, the number of potential visitors will continue to increase.

Offering high-quality content that generates links makes it more likely for other websites to link back to yours. This is a net positive for search engine rankings, showing Google that your web pages are favoured by those making the relevant local searches.

2. Building Up Existing Audience

If you offer high-quality content, you will continue to build an audience. As the website traffic increases, so does the possibility of increasing your core audience.

An SEO provider can facilitate this process, as an optimised website is a hallmark of credibility, enhancing user trust. This gives the users a better experience while improving the impressions on your website. The better an experience the users have, the more likely it will be for them to become recurring website visitors.

DIY SEO Vs. Professional SEO Services

With every SEO cost considered, it’s natural to ponder whether to choose to handle SEO on your own. While the prospect may seem tempting, there are a few pros and cons to consider before leaping into the world of SEO.

The most prominent benefit of handling SEO alone is the reduced expenses commonly associated with cheap SEO. By retaining focus and content creation, you will save on elements like consultation fees. Note that you must still pay for SEO tools for your website to see a marked improvement in traffic and engagement.

The steep learning curve is the major hurdle when making SEO easy for beginners. Understanding how search engine optimisation works for a complete beginner will take a while and some monetary investment. And even then, without experience, the likelihood of your efforts to develop SEO yielding measurable results is not exceedingly high.

Additionally, the DIY methodology may not work out when considering conversion rates and the potential for a high ROI, cost-per-lease and return on investment. And as time goes on, the chasm between what a reputable SEO company can achieve and DIY efforts only widens.

Another thing to keep in mind is the scale of your business. DIY SEO is more feasible to achieve on a smaller scale as the amount of work to be done is relatively lower. As your business grows, DIY SEO’s benefits diminish rapidly.

So, hiring SEO experts may be a wiser investment if you have a medium or large-sized business.

Investing in SEO’s Priceless Returns

SEO has become a fundamental part of advertising a business online in the modern age, and it is essential to driving new customers to the website. After all, a business must find its target audience to improve its sales and receive increased website traffic.

The impact of the complexity of SEO work, the time taken, and the required expertise make SEO a significant expense. That said, the potential returns it offers to mitigate the SEO services cost by a significant degree.

It increases a website’s organic traffic, search visibility, and qualified leads, making it well worth the price of admission.

At sitecentre®, we specialise in delivering exceptional SEO services tailored to your unique needs. Our team of experienced professionals understands the intricacies of search engine algorithms and stays at the forefront of industry trends.

We are committed to maximising your online visibility, improving your website’s performance, and ultimately driving conversions and revenue.

If you’re ready to take your digital presence to new heights and experience the transformative power of SEO, we invite you to contact us today. Let us be your trusted partner in navigating the competitive online landscape and achieving long-term success. Reach out to sitecentre®, and let’s embark on an exciting journey toward digital growth together.

Alannah Picking

With over eight years of industry experience across Digital Marketing, Alannah entered the sitecentre® team in February 2023 as our lead account manager. She comes highly qualified, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Industries from QUT (Queensland University of Technology) and a Postgraduate in Marketing. Alannah’s robust academic background and considerable experience make her an invaluable asset to the team.

Find them on their website: sitecentre®.