SEO is a great way to drive quality traffic to your website, reach more target customers and boost your bottom line. But the biggest question that small business owners struggle with is: “How much does SEO cost per month?”
For monthly SEO plans, agencies charge anywhere from $300 to $10,000 a month depending on the scope of the project, the size of your site and the experience of the agency among other things.
The Benefits of a Monthly SEO Plan
Monthly SEO plans are the route to take when you are looking for a long-term SEO strategy. Most businesses opt for a monthly plan when they want to outsource their SEO needs completely. For a lot of businesses, this is a fruitful way to generate measurable results through SEO.
At Numero, we offer a wide range of monthly SEO packages to suit every budget and goal. We also offer customised plans tailored to your specific goals and requirements.
A monthly SEO plan means that your SEO agency will take care of your entire SEO campaign. They will take care of everything to deliver the results you seek while you free up your time to focus on things only you can do.
An ongoing partnership ensures better communication, improved trust and stronger relationship between the client and the SEO agency.
This is the best way out when you are looking to invest in SEO for the long-term and are looking to delegate every aspect of your search campaign.
It’s also a great option when you want to collaborate with an SEO agency and integrate them with your other departments.
If you look up Google for “SEO packages” or “how much is SEO per month?”, you will come across a wide range of plans and options, which can leave you confused.
So how much should you budget for SEO? That depends on what your requirements are and what services you get.
Three Important Aspects of SEO
Google considers more than 200 ranking signals to decide where to rank a website in the search results, which can be overwhelming and intimidating.
However, if you pay attention to three critical factors, you can still achieve some stellar results, no matter your niche or industry. Here they are:
Information Architecture
Make sure that:
- Search engines can easily crawl and access your website.
- Your website follows the SEO best practices outlined in the Google Webmaster Guidelines
- Your site is mobile responsive
- Has a good page load speed
Content
Content is king for a reason. After all, SEO is incomplete without SEO. So make sure that your content:
- Is unique and original
- Offers excellent value to your readers
- Relevant to search queries
- Satisfies user intent
- Is of high quality
Backlinks
Backlinks are an important part of a good SEO campaign. After all, they are a measure of your website’s authority and expertise. So make sure:
The backlinks are natural. Steer clear of link farms and paid guest posts. Focus on earning links from authority websites that will have a huge impact on your search rankings.
Quality is important here. Even if you earn a small amount of backlinks from high quality websites, you can expect better results compared to getting a ton of low quality backlinks.
There was a time when the success of an SEO strategy was measured only by keyword rankings. Although ranking is critical metric, that’s not the only important one. The most important SEO metrics are those that have an impact on your sales and revenue, namely goal conversions, organic sessions and revenues.
Setting Up a Budget for SEO
The SEO strategies you need for your website will depend on what your goals are. This will pave the way for creating a action plan and the necessary budget.
Ask these pertinent questions:
- Where does your information architecture stand in comparison to your competitors?
- How is your content compared to that of your competitors?
- How is your backlink profile relative to the top ranking website?
Your answers to these questions will pave the way for your SEO strategy. Many a times, the strategy would be the same and the difference is in the volume of work needed.
If you are publishing twice the amount of content and building twice the number of backlinks in budget “2” compared to budget “1” you can expect to achieve success sooner at the higher budget level.
Having said that, the right budget for your SEO campaign is the one you are able to afford (without losing your peace of mind) for at least 6 to 12 months.
Designing and implementing an effective SEO campaign takes time. Moreover, it calls for proactive management and updates in order to deliver the best results.
And the lower your budget, the longer it will take for your strategy to show results.
So How Much Do You Have to Spend on SEO?
If you are targeting whole of New Zealand, your campaign will have a bigger scope and so you can expect to spend upwards of $1,000 to $1,500 a month.
You can test the waters with a smaller plan that costs around $300 to $500. This way you can test the SEO service without taking on a huge risk.
If you cannot afford to hire a professional SEO agency on an ongoing basis, you can opt for a one-off audit SEO campaign. This will allow you to find errors and opportunities for improvement to give a meaningful boost to your online visibility. Keyword research and content marketing are the other critical areas that you can look into on a one-off basis.
Conclusion
When compared to a PPC campaign, your SEO campaign will not deliver instant results. A well-rounded SEO campaign will combine technical SEO, link building and content marketing.
Even if your SEO strategy is executed to the highest standards, it takes time for the search engines to recognise and reward the efforts.
However, the traffic earned from an SEO campaign is the most consistent while delivering the best conversions.
Ready to discuss your SEO strategy? Claim your free SEO audit report or click here to schedule a chat.
