Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of modifying your webpages to better suit how search engines explore and index the web. By participating in SEO, you can ensure that your website appears high in relevant searches, increasing your likelihood to attract organic traffic to your site and convert happy, satisfied customers. These days, every business must participate in SEO, not just to take advantage of the benefits but to avoid penalties that some search engines levy against low-quality sites.
When you first decide to invest in SEO, you have an important choice to make: Do you try to keep SEO efforts in house, or do you outsource to an SEO firm? Perhaps a more realistic question is this: How much do SEO services cost?
The truth is that exact costs will depend on your business and your SEO goals — but here is a general breakdown of typical SEO expenses for in-house and outsourced services.
In-house Costs
For something as important and time-consuming as SEO, hiring a team of in-house experts might seem like a decision that increases efficiency. However, the costs associated with onboarding and maintaining in-house SEO might be prohibitive for most small and medium-sized businesses — and the benefits are relatively slim, too.
The process of recruiting and onboarding is expensive regardless of what type of employee you bring into your business. You could spend weeks or months looking for a good SEO candidate, especially considering that well-trained and experienced SEO experts in search of a new position are few and far between. According to SHRM, the average costs of hiring a new employee and bringing them up to speed within your organization are $4,129. That figure should compound with other upfront expenses, like marketing and SEO tools that your expert(s) need to complete their tasks.
Ongoing expenses will depend on your team’s level of experience. The average SEO specialist commands an annual salary of about $53,352, according to Indeed, and PayScale finds that SEO managers expect an average salary of above $68,476. You will need to pay your SEO team members from the beginning and offer them perks and benefits.
It is more than likely that you will need to hire multiple SEO experts, each of whom focuses on a different technical aspect of optimization, to develop a holistic SEO approach. Plus, you should expect to hire various contractors to generate and publish SEO content, which could cost several hundred dollars per month depending on your content demands.
But that’s not all. In-house SEO also costs you in terms of benefit to your business. While your SEO team will get to know your brand intimately and communicate with you effortlessly, you will lose access to constantly improving SEO skill and technique. SEO is a field that is perpetually changing, and SEO experts need to continuously educate themselves on evolving trends. Often, in-house SEO specialists lose touch with the SEO community, and their SEO strategies become less effective over time.
Outsourcing Costs
There is much more diversity in how you can outsource SEO services, which gives you more control over your costs. For example, you can pay freelance SEO specialists for hourly work, you can pay an SEO agency for monthly services, or you can pay per completed SEO project.
Hourly rates for SEO work tend to range between $100 and $150, but exceedingly experienced SEO professionals can charge upwards of $500 per hour for their services. You might be able to find SEO experts based in other countries who charge less, but you should weigh lower costs with higher difficulty in communicating and the potential for lower-quality service.
Because SEO is not one-and-done, most businesses choose to outsource SEO services on a month-by-month basis. This ensures that your organization receives ongoing SEO benefits but has the freedom to change SEO strategy rather quickly and effectively. Most often, monthly SEO costs range between $500 and $1,000, but again, you can find higher and lower rates depending on the agency you hire and the services you request.
Finally, you can pay for SEO per project — but this is relatively uncommon and much more difficult to accurately predict costs. Businesses of different sizes and scopes will have different SEO needs, and those needs will determine a particular SEO project’s expenses. Many small businesses pay between $500 and $1,000 per project, but many more pay much higher costs — between $1,000 and $10,000 to achieve the SEO results they seek.
For most businesses, outsourcing SEO offers much more bang for buck. SEO professionals, whether they are freelance or work at an agency, are devoted to constantly improving their SEO skill to deliver quality results to their new and longstanding clients. Plus, outsiders can offer a different perspective on your business and brand, changing up your marketing messages for the better. You might find it worthwhile to research your unique SEO needs and related costs, but you will likely find outsourcing to be the best option.
