WHAT MAKES SEO SO EXPENSIVE?

1) AHREFS – $999/mo

Simply put, Ahrefs?helps you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them. It’s an incredibly powerful tool and in the right hands, provides a roadmap for what SEO efforts will be needed going forward to outrank the competition. It lets us clearly breakdown how your high ranking competitors are building their campaigns, where their backlinks are coming from, as well as their quality.?

And it’s not just?current data, but includes historical data as well. On a scan we performed for a new client yesterday, we can see that 6 months ago their main competitor engaged in a crappy link buying SEO strategy. Earning themselves over 2500 backlinks to their website, and losing as many in 2 months time. How powerful is it to know a competitor’s actions, what they spend on, how often and its effectiveness? I’ll leave that rhetorical for now.

3) SEMRush – $499.95/mo

?SEMRush is the go-to tool for inorganic SEO. It greatly helps improve the results of your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns by providing Ad strategy analysis, keyword grouping and management, cross-group negatives optimization and Ad keyword and creatives research – WITH competition analysis. It also provides instant insights into your social strategy and allows you to build a more effective one than your competitors. It is the ultimate for paid advertising research.

We are in nearly $2000/mo with just the 3 most popular tools an SEO professional needs to do their job properly. Let’s look at some other considerations that factor into the cost of hiring an SEO pro, then we’ll dive into the actual value this all brings and whether it’s actually ‘that‘ expensive when compared to traditional advertising avenues.

Staff Considerations & Professional Hourly Rate

As wonderful as all of these amazing tools are, they just don’t run themselves. Furthermore, each requires a certain amount of industry knowledge to quantify their respective results and develop a strategy or game plan to implement for the client to have positive results and return on investment. These are big business decisions that have consequences, decisions that shouldn’t be made by anyone less than educated professionals with a proven track record of success.

How much exactly do agencies and consultants charge you ask? Here is the breakdown.

And let’s not forget about content researchers/writers! One of the biggest SEO boosts a website can get is from CONTENT! On-site blog content doesn’t just give your site visitors more information, it fills your website with industry rich keywords that really boost organic rankings. The content writer is what really bridges the gap between the data insights those expensive tools provided and results. They’ll be targeting article length, what keywords to use, how many times it should appear and in what format (plain text, anchor link text, header text). They’ll rerun reports of the new content with that of the highest ranking on google and make any technical adjustments needed to beat it. And most importantly, they’ll write the content so it’s enjoyable to be read by humans and not just search engine computers. A tall task and a time consuming one at that.

The time it takes to SEO

Do You want a guarantee? I’ll give you one! I guarantee you nothing about SEO is fast. It takes time to analyze data and form a strategy, it takes time to write quality blog articles, syndicated content and make on-site optimizations. It takes time for Google to reindex your site and your new content as well as that of your competitors. Then it takes time to do it all over again after quantifying results and either staying on course or pivoting.

Depending on your particular domain and the authority is has, it’s a safe bet that tangible results from SEO happen in 4-6 months. Though there are plenty of cases where your competition has too great a head start and is actively campaigning to stay on top- out maneuvering and out spending you consistently.

Consistency is the name of the game here! No matter what your budget is, it is always more beneficial to spread it out over the course of a year instead of spending it all on one campaign. Google rewards you for this and conversely, penalizes you for stagnating. I’ll spare you from reading between the lines on this one: Even if you are successful today, if you stand still, you’re going to get beat. This is why having a trusted consultant is a great first step- they’ll be able to give you the 500 foot overview of your competition and advise on steps you’ll need to take, their cost, benefits of taking action and implications of inaction. This is valuable to know as early as possible considering the time it take to enact change. If you’re feeling compelled to, you can schedule a free 45 minute SEO phone consult here that will get your ship pointed in the right direction.

Is SEO really that expensive?

We do all Digital Marketing here and can speak intelligently on this. The answer is No. SEO is cheaper than traditional advertising and pay per click (Read: SEO delivers more value, for a longer period of time, it just takes longer to achieve it).

Let’s take this local Dental practice as an example. The single doctor practice had about 1200 patients and was losing about 120 per year. The volume of competition in the area gave patients many options to choose from and kept the cost of services from being increased. Over the past 3 years, they were only getting a handful of new patients per month, employees wanted raises and economic inflation was ever present at an average rate of 3%. This spells trouble for any business and it was time to do something about it. The practice outsourced their marketing and SEO to us and we got to work on getting more marketshare in the short term with paid inorganic advertising at the same time bolstering SEO organically with content and backlink building and syndicated content that we offer as part of our SEO packages. The results speak for themselves and gives us some good insight here. For our client to get 150 new patients in a year to overcome attrition, inflation and allow for growth, what was done for $17k in SEO would cost 5x as much to do inorganically.

Quantifying these decisions further: One new dental patient on average is worth $1,000/revenue in the first year, and $10,000 total over their lifetime as a customer (7-10 years). Even though the paid ad campaigns costed $588/new patient (a figure slightly above the ADA’s published average cost to acquire a customer) and ROI happens within the first year alone, it simply doesn’t make sense to continue with huge ad spend when the SEO organic Cost to Acquire a Customer is SO much less and has lasting effects.

So I ask you, compared to other methods, is SEO really that expensive?