Search engine optimization price - What exactly does it consist of?

The main topic of this article is the price of search engine optimization - what it consists of, how much it should cost and what should be taken into account before buying services. With search engine optimization, potential customers can find your company through organic search engine results at any time of the day, from anywhere in the world. The higher you rank on the results pages, the more clicks and traffic your website will get. This is what Search Engine Optimization or SEO aims for.

In addition to the mere quantity of web traffic, the purpose of SEO is to increase its quality, which helps to achieve the ultimate goal of optimization; increasing sales . Because SEO improves the user experience of a website, customers are also more likely to become repeat buyers.

It sounds nice, but at this point, of course, the question comes to mind: what does this luxury cost and what does the price of search engine optimization consist of? Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this, because depending on the goals of the company, the condition of the website and the author, the price of search engine optimization varies.

Whether you are a local entrepreneur or an online retailer, after reading this article you will know all the factors that affect the price of search engine optimization and what kind of costs you can expect for yourself.

Why should a company invest in search engine optimization?

Let's start by telling you why it's worth investing in search engine optimization in the first place. As we already mentioned above, with the help of search engine optimization, website traffic and brand awareness are increased through organic, i.e. non-paid, search engine results.

Search engine optimization is a very cost-effective marketing method, because while your competitors use maltas for paid web traffic, with search engine optimization you can get high-quality web traffic to your site without paying for it directly.

Of course, you can still buy advertising space and thereby boost sales even more, but if your budget is tight, you should definitely start your company's marketing with search engine optimization of your website. This is due to a couple of things.

Search engine optimization improves your site's visibility and customer experience

Firstly, Search Engine Optimization has a positive effect on the site's user experience. Success in user experience is an essential part of success in online trading, because if your own website is even a little slow , difficult or otherwise annoying to use , a potential customer will not see it as worth the effort and will simply leave the site.

Your competitor with a better website will thank you for all the deals you practically give him.

Secondly, search engine optimization has an effect on how well paid advertising and especially Google ads work in general. Google looks at the technical features of websites when determining their search engine rankings, because it also wants to offer visitors the best possible user experience. (And if your potential customer doesn't get it, you won't do business again.)

At this point, the website loading speed becomes a special object of scrutiny, but also other site features, for example structure, linking, contents and code, have a role in how user-friendly search engines and customers find your website.

Search engine optimization aims to improve all these issues.

Why don't you read the price of search engine optimization anywhere?

The things mentioned above are therefore areas of search engine optimization that are polished to prime condition during optimization.

The initial situation of your website depends on what measures need to be taken in order to improve the site's condition and achieve the search engine optimization goals. In practice, the condition of your website can be anywhere between bad, really bad , great, "just fine" and good, but there is still some room for improvement .

For this reason, it is almost impossible to set a fixed price for search engine optimization that would be the same for everyone.

What does Search Engine Optimization usually cost?

The price of search engine optimization varies. Usually, however, we are talking about thousands of euros , and depending on the author, the price can be significantly lower or higher. Search engine optimization prices can and should be compared when you are looking for a suitable partner.

When planning your own marketing budget, you should take into account that choosing the cheapest option can become expensive afterwards, when carelessly performed Search Engine Optimization does not produce the desired results and measures that have already been performed once have to be corrected again by another expert.

That's why it's especially important to choose a professional who definitely knows his stuff as a partner. (You will find more tips on choosing the right author for you at the end of this article.)

Since search terms and the criteria set by search engines are also constantly changing, Search Engine Optimization is also not done all at once. Search engine optimization must be constantly developed so that customers can find your website now and in the future. The best approach is to look at search engine optimization as a monthly investment that creates a strong foundation for all other marketing.

In addition, there are different pricing models for search engine optimization.

At Growly, we want to produce the best possible results for our customers, so for us, the price of search engine optimization is determined based on how much time our experts have to spend on it. The price of Growly's search engine optimization varies, depending on the needs and goals of the company, between a few hundreds and thousands , but always according to the customer's budget and agreed in advance.

Since our own mission is to help companies of all sizes grow, even small ones, we mention here that at the time of writing we offer search engine optimization at an offer price as affordable as €329 - €699 /month.

The best way to find out the exact price is when you make an appointment for a survey with us or another company in the field. But if you want to get a little idea of what optimization might cost in your particular case, keep reading. Next, let's go through the things that affect the final price of search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization price - Factors that determine the price of optimization

The cost of SEO depends on the type of work your website needs to increase visibility.

In order to get the most out of the marketing budget, the search engine optimization expert always tailors the services according to the company's goals and the strategy aimed at achieving them, as well as the website to be optimized.

All sites are different, but the biggest difference in SEO pricing is caused by the following services and things:

Technical Search Engine Optimization

The initial state of the website

Search engines' algorithms and the criteria they set for websites are constantly updated, so what worked on websites a couple of years ago may no longer work today.

In addition to search engine optimization, every website is required to meet certain basic criteria, which, despite this, are not met by many companies. Examples of this are e.g. website loading speed under two seconds, scalability for mobile devices, optimized structure and seamless user experience .

If the technical state of your website needs updating, you can expect the price of search engine optimization to be higher there. Then technical Search Engine Optimization is performed on the site, which, as its name suggests, covers all matters related to the site's technology.

The main goal of tweaking the technology is of course to improve the user experience. This is done so that Google would classify your site as worth recommending and that the visitors would actually do what you want them to do on the site, i.e. complete a purchase or contact your company.

If the website is in really bad shape, it is often faster and cheaper to completely renew the website.

If the technology of your website is already in order and your search engine ranking is already good, maintaining and improving that situation will cost less than starting work from scratch.

Keyword research

Keyword research is used to find out what keywords your target audience types into search engines when they are looking for companies like yours and the products or services they offer.

Based on the keywords, the website content is optimized so that your site appears in search results containing those keywords. For this, you need to identify the exact keywords and key phrases that your potential customers use, and create content that matches these searches.

At the same time, the search engine optimizer checks the competitive situation of the search terms and analyzes which keywords or terms can be used to improve your site's search engine visibility the best. Thorough keyword research is therefore the basis of all search engine optimization.

In addition, often during the keyword research performed by a professional, it becomes clear that the company's website cannot be reached with the same search terms as the entrepreneur himself might have thought or planned.

For these reasons, keyword research is always done in conjunction with every search engine optimization.

Internal Search Engine Optimization

Website content

The amount and quality of content on an already existing website affects how much Search Engine Optimization will cost you. And contrary to popular belief, there is much more to internal SEO than just adding keywords to text.

Among other things, image and video optimization , page titles , internal linking and going through the site for conflicting or missing metadata and other content (because these have a negative effect on search engine ranking), are all part of internal search engine optimization.

You can produce some of the online content, such as the texts, yourself, but then you cannot be completely sure whether the relevant area of search engine optimization has been done correctly.

At Growly, we are also able to guide and help our customers in continuous content optimization, for example when updating websites, but even then, the search engine ranking of the site remains up to Google to decide.

External Search Engine Optimization

Site backlinks

Backlinks have long been one of the most important factors that search engines use when determining website search rankings.

The higher quality your backlinks are, the higher your site will appear in search results containing targeted keywords. This is because quality backlinks tell Google and other search engines that your website is reliable and relevant, for example.

Since building backlinks can take some time, this task also contributes to the final price of search engine optimization.

The amount and level of competition

Since you are competing for search engine rankings with other companies in your industry, the price of search engine optimization may, depending on the situation, be affected by what your competitors are doing online.

At the beginning of search engine optimization, you should do background research on your competitors and take into account how often they publish quality content , how much of it is already ready and how well your competitors are committed to their target audience .

The answers to these questions can either make it easier or harder to increase the visibility of your own website, because if the level of your competitors is tough, the goal of your website's search engine optimization will be to reach the same situation and ideally also surpass it (which is not necessarily an easy task).

If, on the contrary, the level is weak, you will be able to reach a higher position in the organic search results and increase your brand awareness faster than usual.

Website size

In order for the organic visibility in search engines to increase in the long term and the web traffic to the site to increase to the desired extent, search engine optimization should focus on the entire website and not, for example, parts of it or only half of all pages.

This means that the larger your website is, the more likely it will require more man hours and increase the cost of SEO.

In addition to performing SEO, planning and research also take time.

For example, creating a comprehensive action plan and checking which pages should be updated during search engine optimization will take more or less time depending on the size of the website.

Search engine optimization goals and operational planning

Since well planned is half done, some time should also be spent on planning search engine optimization.

The planning work begins at the beginning of the cooperation by mapping the goals of the search engine optimization to be performed and the means by which the goals are achieved in accordance with the client's budget. The bigger the goals are, the more measures must be taken to achieve them, and naturally this affects the price of search engine optimization.

A search engine optimization plan is drawn up based on the needs and goals of the client company. In order to make search engine optimization as effective as possible, the partner performing the optimization should also spend time getting to know the client's business.

The practical implementation of search engine optimization begins with defining keywords that support the client's business. These can also be devised together with the customer. After this, the search engine optimizer performs a comprehensive keyword research, which serves as the basis for the search engine optimization to be performed.

If a proper plan is not made at the beginning of the operation, the entrepreneur may well wake up to the fact that the original price of search engine optimization has skyrocketed in the middle of the process, because not all the necessary measures were taken into account.

Of course, no one wants to find themselves in this situation, and that is why a search engine optimization professional should know how to plan and organize the entire process from start to finish before starting the actual optimization. In order to avoid adjustments and misunderstandings, it would also be important that the communication between the customer and the author works well. For this reason, it is particularly important to choose a competent and suitable provider for search engine optimization, and not necessarily the cheapest one.

Analysis and development of results

Analyzing the results and developing them is part of search engine optimization whenever you have outsourced website maintenance and continuous search engine optimization to your partner.

Without data analysis and development of results, it is not possible to achieve long-term search engine optimization results. Only when the analytics are monitored regularly, we will be able to understand what kind of results the Search Engine Optimization will produce for you and how the results can be improved.

Based on the data, decisions are therefore made about new measures, the purpose of which is to increase your website's traffic and conversions (which can be, for example, sales or contacts) from before.

If you don't use the data, you can never know which measures work on your website and which ones don't, which means it's not worth spending more time and money on. In other words, the fact that your partner spends time analyzing your website's data will save you in the long run the costs of search engine optimization and improve the results you get from it.

How to choose the right factor for search engine optimization?

Now that you know all the things that affect the price of search engine optimization, you may wonder how you can choose the right partner for you.

Choosing the right service provider is particularly important, as the entrepreneur often has to pay out of his own pocket for errors resulting from, for example, lack of professional skills, lack of planning and inadequate communication.

In addition to a marketing agency, your option is to seek help from a freelancer or consultant skilled in search engine optimization. In this case, you should remember to find out the areas of expertise of the persons in question and the things included in the package properly.

From a freelancer, you may not get all the search engine optimization services that marketing agencies offer. You can always hire a few marketing freelancers who are skilled in different areas, but then you also get to take on the role of project manager.

If you choose the help of a consultant, first find out if Search Engine Optimization is included in the price or if you have to do it yourself, and if in this case you have to pay separately for each advice in addition to the initial consultation. Often a consultant will be happy to handle website optimization, but if the latter is the case, you may end up paying more for advice than for SEO from a reputable marketing agency.

Tips for those considering search engine optimization services

At the end, we give a few more tips that entrepreneurs should keep in mind when looking for or choosing a search engine optimization provider:

Does the service provider have references and proof of competence, for example in the form of customer cases and reviews? Check if there are any or ask about experience if the references seem incomplete.
Does communication with the partner go smoothly? If misunderstandings seem to repeat themselves in the early stages or you don't trust the operator for some reason, you should consider changing the operator before things progress further.
Do both parties know for sure what the service provider's share of search engine optimization is and what you might want to do yourself? Make sure that these issues are covered, for example, in the request for quotation or in the assignment agreement.
Be wary of all those operators who claim that search engine optimization or any other marketing measure is a quick solution to every problem of your business and promise results in a suspiciously short time or for a small amount.
Beware of large advertising agencies with constantly changing staff. The results of search engine optimization can stagnate and even suffer if the person performing it changes constantly and you have to familiarize yourself with your business again and again.
However, remember that you don't need a search engine optimizer that specializes in your industry. This is because those who specialize in a certain industry often do the same things to all their client companies, which doesn't help you stand out in search results - quite the opposite.
If you choose a larger company as your partner, instead of the project manager, find out the experience of the people working on your project and, if you wish, the time spent in the company.

As a recap, we listed all the things that affect the price of search engine optimization:

The initial situation of the website, i.e. the need for technical search engine optimization
The contents of the pages, i.e. the need for internal search engine optimization
Linking, i.e. the need for external search engine optimization
Website size or complexity
Partner's pricing model
The amount and level of competition online
Continuity and development of search engine optimization
Keyword research

Hopefully, with the help of this information, you will now be able to form at least some idea of what the Search Engine Optimization of your own website could cost, and you will be able to choose the right partner for your company.

And as we mentioned earlier, the best way to find out the price of search engine optimization is when you boldly contact one or two companies in the field. If you need professional help with search engine optimization, you can book a survey here. During the free survey, we will look together at your goals and how to achieve them according to your budget.