SEO Tips
6 SEO Pricing Factors Where Knowledge is Power
SEO pricing is very important for both clients and users. If the client doesn't understand the value that comes from that price he pays, then he will have very high expectations. And obviously, SEO pricing needs to be created based on the results that SEO agency can deliver. You just can't promise amazing results if you can't provide them in any possible way. But as you can imagine, this problem starts well before the SEO process actually begins. It all comes down to the proposal process, as here is where most of the problems end up creating out of nowhere.
Costs and the results you expect
The client is interested in only a few things. He wants to get the best services at a good cost and with amazing results. As you can imagine, all of these will carry on within the entire digital marketing experience with any company. Of course, if a company wants only the best results, pricing is left as a secondary thing.
What they want here is to access the best experience and they will focus on that with the proposal. If they focus on the price, then the price is maybe the most important factor for the proposal. The expectations will vary based on that. But these things aren't really correct all the time.
When you want to get the lowest price, that's exactly what you get. That doesn't necessarily mean you will receive value. Why is that? Because value will cost you a lot more. All digital marketers will try to keep the costs low by delivering the minimal stuff to sell the desired service. That doesn't mean you will receive a very good quality. If you want quality, then your proposal needs to come with a focus on a higher service quality and obviously it will also generate a higher price as well.
Proposal limitations
The issue here is simple. Usually the proposals focused on price or value don't really seem to be that different to begin with. They are pretty much the same, something that can make it all too hard to distinguish the value from quality to begin with. So you do have to wonder at what degree these services are implemented to begin with.
For example, page optimization does have specific factors like the amount of keywords, what keywords need to be used and how many pages have to be implemented. A similar thing appears in the case of links. As you can imagine, all of these things tend to come with a very high degree of interpretation. This is why you have to address this to the best of capabilities as otherwise the results might not be as good as you can expect.
Basically, just because a service is provided that doesn't mean you will know everything there is to know about that service. You need to know how the service providers determine their costs. If they have a proven way to assess everything or if they make the prices on the go. A stricter proposal price will show you that the value will be second to none, which is exactly why you have to invest in a good service to begin with.
After all, the value of the service should be a priority here. You need to see the value that is delivered via each service and the quality that you actually receive through it. Sometimes it will be easy to figure all of this out, other times it will be very tough to do so. But with a good approach and focus you will see that nothing is impossible. So, here are a few pricing factors that usually get ignored but which can easily influence most SEO service prices.
The number of pages that you have on your site
Finding an SEO price for your website is actually really easy if you have a very small website. You don't have to worry with a very complex website architecture and thus there will be less work than expected. Obviously, this means that the site will start small and it will continue to work like that in the long haul. The optimization process is created specifically with the idea of reaching more people via keyword targeting. So, the entire focus here is on growing the website via web marketing.
That's why it's a good idea to start with a smaller site and optimize it as you grow. If you start with a larger one, the optimization process will be more complex and thus it will be harder and harder to reach some very good results to begin with. Obviously, making sure that the navigation is fully optimized can be very tricky, but then again this is crucial. It will help boost the user experience and it will also assure you that people will reach the desired pages fast. E-commerce websites can be hard to optimize based on the CMS used for them. A similar thing happens when you want to optimize a page for both conversions and search. It will not be easy, but results will pay off very well in the future. If the site starts small, then you will look at savings of around thousands of dollars each month. So yes, you can save a lot of money with this type of service.
The website condition
Even if the website might be small, there are situations when the only way to fix it is to just re-develop it. That will eat up a lot of time and money, resources that your company might not have. Digital marketing professionals know that you should re-develop only when necessary, as that is when you will get the ultimate success and the best possible results on the market. However, the digital marketing service provider will tell you if a website redesign is needed or if you just have to stick to the older website. Sure, it can be a larger expense to make the site ready, but it's one that has to be assessed fast.
Obviously, this also means that larger sites might actually be very easy to fix at times. It all comes down to the approach you have and the current state of the site. There are many large sites that don't need a lot of repairs and fixes, so an assessment will be needed. Of course, the worse this situation gets, the more work will be needed and the higher the price will be. A good website audit will help provide a report that you build from right away. It will not be hard to use it, but the experience will be very well worth it!
Competitors
In order for the digital marketing services provider to share the right price, he will also need to study the competition. Keep in mind that the competitors might be doing things you are not, so obviously you have to learn from their approach. You have to see if they are active on social media and how active they really get on these mediums. You also have to check if they publish content often and so on. The user experience angle can also make or break the experience here.
Learning from the competition and studying them is what the digital marketing services provider has to do. Based on what you miss and what has to be added, he will come up with a relevant price as he starts to provide you with the best services on the market.
Aggressiveness
You need to figure out how powerful the SEO approach is to begin with. Usually, it focuses on 5 different things:
- You want to start slow because you didn't prioritize web marketing
- You are losing sales and you have to address the problem
- The competition is crushing you and you need to make some massive changes really fast
- Web marketing is a true focus and you need to focus on having a very robust and powerful campaign
- You want to complete as many objectives as you have a very powerful campaign.
You need to have the right expectations, you just can't expect money to solve everything. Cutting costs or reducing some of the essential services is not exactly an option. You will need to try and restructure the campaign in order to focus it more on advices and consulting instead of opting for some results that your campaign just isn't aggressive enough to achieve.
Ongoing services
You can find two service types from digital marketing services provider. There are one time jobs and ongoing jobs. Fixes are the ones included in that first category. Most of the time, you just see a problem and you fix it. It's simple enough and the experience will be great in the longer term.
However, most of the SEO services are created with the idea of being ongoing. Finding more keywords, studying data and seeing results then finding solutions is something ongoing. The ongoing prices will most likely impact this solution quite a bit, but it will also make things more rewarding to begin with. Large sites have ongoing page optimization and social optimization as major costs, however you can lower costs by reducing the time spent on any of these. But if you want to get the best outcome, ongoing SEO has to be a priority.
SEO experience and skill
As you can imagine, each digital marketing services provider has a different experience in this field. You might not see this translated in his price right from the start, but usually you will see that just about every price range is created based on that model. You have to keep in mind that all proposals are created based on the amount of time you want to invest.
While you expect to be priced for any single service the digital marketer does, that's not exactly what happens here. Even if you don't see a number, that doesn't really mean that time is not recorder. Obviously, what should matter for you is the value you receive and not the price per hour. At the end of the day, you will have to do some trial and error tests with multiple services to ensure that they can provide the type of results you might need. It will not be easy to find a good provider, but in the end the outcome can be a very good one. You should try to pick the marketer that delivers the best value for cost.
Ignorance isn't a good idea
You should never ignore the importance of SEO service pricing. These 6 factors are very important and they can make a lot of difference here. You have to keep in mind that your main goal is to have the best value for your money, so you should always take that into consideration. Not investing in something with a good ROI will lead to a downfall, so your main focus is to understand what you get for your money. Try to ask for some clarifications, understand how invested the digital marketing services provider is in your project and how many people will work on it. The higher the scope, the higher the price but at the end of the day you can get some very good results too. So it will definitely be worth it!
If you ignore all the aforementioned points you will end up failing quite a bit. Keep in mind that the best way to avoid disasters is to work closely with the digital marketing services provider and understand what you get for your money. Your campaigns should be created on value, not money!