How Much Should I Spend On Seo?

Tackling SEO single-handedly can be difficult, especially if you’re a small business and don’t possess the resources to work on it properly in house. Outsourcing may well prove necessary to ensure that your site is getting the organic traffic it needs to thrive.

Luckily, the UK’s SEO market has taken off in recent years and this competition has led to a surge in affordable SEO services. With so many agencies to choose from, though, you’ll have to know what you’re looking for to receive the best ROI.

Low Cost SEO

With some agencies claiming to be able to boost your website’s search rankings for as little as £50 a month with no set up cost, you would be forgiven for being taken in by the low fees.

The unfortunate reality is that while it’s important to keep things affordable, SEOrequires a lot of time and research and you can’t cut corners.

With these low budget agencies, you’ll be paying very little– but you’ll be getting very little in return. Such agencies have been known to blatantly plant keywords into five-star reviews on obscure sites. Not only will this have a very limited effect on driving traffic to your website, but this unskilled repetition is obviously not the kind of practice that you want associated with your business.

Mid-Level SEO

Mid-level SEO fees begin at around £500-£1,500 a month in addition to a set-up charge, usually in the realm of £2,000-£4,000. While this is undoubtedly a step up from the lowest tier, you’ll also unsurprisingly note a step up in the quality of service.

Mid-range agencies will put most of their energy into fixing any on-page issues your website may have. You can expect to be provided with data around keywords you should be targeting, as well as a plan to optimise your website’s content and architecture to match these keywords.

Some of these affordable SEO agencies will also offer a content marketing package. The aim here is to transform your website into a tool for prospective clients to find useful information, but, as with Low Cost SEO, this should be treated with caution. If the volume of content and the results they are proposing to generate seem unbelievable for the price, you may want to question whether the agency plans on churning out content without sufficient research.

High-End SEO

To see a significant ROI, you will inevitably need to put more money into the project. For a monthly fee falling between £1,500-£10,000 and set-up fee of around £10,000, a high-end agency will work with you not just to fix on-page issues but to construct a cohesive digital marketing strategy.

By conducting an in-depth analysis of your user experience—from search and socials to marketing automations—these agencies will take the time to properly understand your potential clients. After this profiling is complete, they’ll put together a comprehensive plan for the year which focuses on developing and promoting the content your customers need. You should expect to hear precise, achievable goals for growing traffic and converting leads into sales. Approaching these high-end agencies will prove especially worthwhile for sites needing to cut through the noise of considerable online competition.

At the end of the day, businesses cannot afford to neglect SEO work. You’ll need to spend money either outsourcing this work to an affordable SEO agency or bringing it in house. It’s important to see past the initial price tag here and consider the quality of service on offer: if you don’t invest sufficiently in SEO, you won’t see a healthy ROI, and what you do spend will feel wasted. Your organic traffic is worth more.

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Kit Jones is a professional consultant at LeadGeneratorsDigital, a successful online marketing agency focusing on a variety of digital strategies including content and SEO marketing. The agency provides affordable SEO for businesses looking to not only boost their Google rankings, but also their conversion rates and the overall quality of their site.