How does your SEO agency workout how much to charge?

Introduction

Whether you sell used cars, or you make delicious chocolate bars and ship your product all over the U.K, you’re probably going to need help to improve your digital marketing in the great city of Bristol.

Yet, when you write an e-mail and send it off to various agencies, well, you then see that the prices for search engine optimisation, well, they can sometimes be wildly different, in terms of price.

We can only speak for our agency, yet, we thought it would be a good idea to write how we figure out how much to quote to each customer in Bristol.

So, without further ado, here’s some of the things our marketing agency thinks about, when we are asked to quote.

The competition

Okay, so some seo agencies may have set prices, for example on their website, they have prices which are set out as packages, however we don’t take that approach to offering prices, and we shall explain why.

With organic SEO, it all depends on the level of competition that you face, so for instance, let’s say you run a dental practice, you’ve just set-up, you’ve got your branding sorted, and you’re now looking for a local SEO company.

However, what needs to be done, before we offer a quote is to see how strong your competitors are, so for instance if you want to cover the whole of Bristol, well, the competition will be very strong indeed, you may have for example a number of dentists, which have been paying good seo agencies for a very long period of time, to improve their seo, as you would expect, to beat these, well, its not going to be a walk in the park.

So, let’s say across Bristol, there’s 100 dental practices paying for SEO, yet let’s say 25% of these, have been paying for top-quality SEO for over 7 years, now you can see how much work is needed, to even overtake these businesses, as your practice, will need to beat that standard of SEO, which the others may have been diligently improving for a long time, this is why organic is a slow process.

So, in essence, what our digital marketing agency does, and many others do, is before we send out a quote, we do need to weigh-up how strong the competition is.

Current standard of organic SEO

The next thing to do, is to work out your business’s current standard of SEO, so for example, here’s just some of the various questions our SEO consultants may ask:

–        How old is your domain name?

–        What is the quality of the evergreen content marketing?

–        Has the business ever incurred an algorithmic penalty from Google in the past?

–        Has the business ever incurred a manual penalty from Google in the past?

–        How many backlinks does the website have?

–        What is the quality of those backlinks?

–        Are the backlinks relevant?

–        Are they mostly do-follow backlinks?

–        Are they mostly no-follow backlinks?

Our SEO consultants will look at a lot more factors as well, to determine, as your company website stands, how strong the organic SEO is.

Google’s algorithm rewards regular quality work

What a business owners need to know is that how Google’s algorithm works is that it uses a bot, called “Googlebot” to crawl and index websites on a very regular basis.

Therefore, a website is routinely crawled and indexed by Googlebot, to look for new SEO work, so, as long as that work is “white hat” and top-quality, then this can help to improve your SEO, if its not, and the work is not quality, then this adversely effect your SEO- so, a word to the wise, only invest in quality SEO.  

Don’t take your foot off the gas

So, this is a common mistake that a lot of businesses make, that is, they pay a company, like ours, to improve their SEO, let’s say they run a hairdressing saloon in Clifton Bristol, just as an example.

Now, that business might after say 9 months, of paying for SEO, reach position 1 on Google, which is great, but what a lot of companies don’t realise is, if they were to call their SEO agency, and say, were pausing our monthly fee for a while, well they might drop back down.

That’s because how Google works is like this, the algorithm uses Googlebot to see if any changes have occurred to the company’s website. Now, let’s say 3 other businesses were to heavily spend on quality seo, as they want to be say ranked at the top for “local hairdressing saloons” or “hairdressers Clifton” or let’s say “hair highlights in Bristol”- then those businesses, who are paying for seo, to get to the top, well, they might obtain the strongest seo, and therefore rise to the top spots.  

You can’t afford to stand idle

With SEO, it’s a constant battle to reach the top, plus, there might be sometimes hundreds of other companies, trying to get right to the number 1 position of Google as well, this is why, with organic SEO, it’s a continuous process.

Google’s WebMaster Guidelines

Whichever type of business you run, whether you’re a sole trader electrician, or you’re a director of a solicitors practice, with over a thousand staff, your business, if you want to improve your seo, must follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.