Companies that don’t blog fail to expose their business to 8 out of 10 potential customers. If you want to maximize the number of times your business shows up in the search engines — you need to have a blog.
A large part of small business search engine optimization is putting content out there, so people can find your business. People find your content by entering queries in the search engines and if your content matches and ranks — there you are.
How much does it cost? Continue reading this article, and we will talk more about search engine optimization pricing and what you should know.
Strategy & Consultation
If you are a DIY kind of person and want to do your own SEO, you might think of hiring someone to put a strategy together for you. Consultants can often help you put a strategy together for ranking in the search engines, but unless you know the basics — it can be pretty confusing.
Strategy and consultation sessions can cost $100/hr and upwards. If you don’t understand the first go around, you might need to hire the consultant back for multiple sessions, which will be additional costs.
Content Creation
You might need someone to create your content for your website or for your blog. Depending on how much content you need to be created and what type of content it is, it could cost you anywhere from $100 plus per piece of content.
If you get a content package, make sure you have them itemize what content you are getting and how frequently you’ll get it.
Social Media
Social signals are a factor in ranking on social media. If there are a lot of people sharing your blog posts and visiting your website, it’s a good sign to the search engines that your site is a relevant and trusted site.
There are people that will charge your $50 – $100 to build social signals to your website, but that money is better spent paying someone to manage your own social media accounts.
Backlinks & Citations
Think of backlinks like votes for your site that tell the search engines that you’re a good site to recommend. Keep in mind that all backlinks are not weighted the same. If you get a backlink from a highly reputable website, it is going to give you more “juice” than a website that is new and not trusted by the search engines.
Citations are any place where your business name, address, phone, and website URL are listed. They are important for your SEO because these are signals that your business is a legitimate business that you’re working to promote.
You can find people to build your citations for anywhere from $250 and up. Some companies want to retain ownership of the profiles. You should only work with companies that give you the login information and the ability to manage your own listings.
As far as backlinks, you can often buy links for $100 and up. Always be careful when you’re buying links since this is a very touchy subject.
Managed SEO
Managed SEO is the ultimate in SEO bang for your buck. When you choose a managed SEO plan, you don’t have to do anything.
The SEO company does your keyword research, creates content, builds backlinks, sends out press releases, and any other tasks you agree upon. Choosing managed SEO means you’re taking the guesswork out of things.
You don’t have to wonder if you bought the right amount of content, if you chose the right keywords to try to rank for and any other number of things that would have bothered you otherwise.
Managed SEO can start anywhere from $500 and go up to $10,000, depending on the scale of your project.
How to Choose a Good SEO Company
When you’re considering professional SEO services, you shouldn’t jump in blindly. The SEO company that you choose will make or break your strategy. Hiring a company that doesn’t know what they are doing will actually hurt your website because they could use bad practices that get your website penalized.
Beyond reading reviews about the company, you need to ask them questions about their content, link building strategy, how many citations they build, if they do press releases, and more.
If you still aren’t comfortable with the situation, ask them to show you some examples of people they’ve done work for. You should also ask them if you can speak to a couple of those clients so they can vouch for their services.
Deciding to Handle SEO Internally
If you don’t want to hire an outside company, you can have someone take care of things in-house. Make sure the person you put in charge of the project understands SEO since this is very different than traditional marketing.
If you hand over SEO tasks to your marketing team that doesn’t understand how SEO works, you are going to get less than great results. If you do decide to take care of SEO in-house, you’ll need a content team, pr team, and more to help you stay ahead of the competition that is using SEO companies that do these things all day long.
Before opting for in-house, consider how much more expensive it will be to pay people thousands of dollars per year instead of outsourcing to a company — even if you did pay $5,000 per month or more.
Small Business Search Engine Optimization for the Win
Now you know more about small business search engine optimization. Now that you have an understanding of how much money you might need to put out for these services and other things you need to know, you can decide if this is the right path for you.
Do you want to learn more about SEO and other things that can help your business? Continue reading our blog to get the help you and your business need to reach the next level.
