How Can I Be Sure My SEO Agency Is Charging Me a Fair Price?

Computer screen with SEO agency price growth

It’s not always going to be to your benefit to choose the lowest SEO agency price that you can find. Google penalties can cause long-term damage to your website and make reputable SEO agencies valuable for providing legitimate results. But you also want to make sure these agencies aren’t overcharging you. Learn exactly how much SEO services cost and how to avoid paying extra to get high rankings. 

What Value Can SEO Bring?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a marketing channel companies use to increase their visibility organically by improving their rankings in search engines like Google or Bing. SEO agency services help optimize your site to get your site ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Higher rankings help increase traffic to your site, which in turn can increase conversions. 

To accurately assess whether or not your SEO agency price is too high, it’s important to understand how valuable it is to be in the number one spot in a search result and how much work it takes to get there. 

About 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search, and if you grab the top spot for a search query, you’ll likely enjoy a 32% average click-through rate back to your site. These spots are highly valuable for any company and will generate revenue quickly if you can obtain them. 

What Does an SEO Agency Do?

There are many strategies to rank your website on search engines. Knowing the full range of services the agency provides and comparing prices with other agencies that offer similar packages will help you understand if they offer good value. 

  • Optimizing your site for mobile access
  • Decreasing page loading times
  • Completing schema markup
  • Matching search intent with content
  • Creating substantial webpage content
  • Generating backlinks
  • Optimizing images on site
  • Optimizing for keywords

Agencies can choose to focus on one of these services, or they can provide a variety for you to choose from. Ultimately, you will want to gauge their performance based on how many visitors from organic traffic you are getting and how that traffic translates to your business goals. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term marketing solution and results generally take anywhere from 4-6 months to start appearing. 

The Average SEO Agency Price

Not every business understands how much SEO services cost, and only about half already have a budget in place for SEO. About 17% of small businesses with an SEO budget spend less than $100 a month for services. However, there’s a cost for cutting corners when it comes to SEO. Not all agencies are willing to put in the necessary work at that price point and will resort to grey or black hat methods of SEO to get your site to rank. This can involve buying backlinks from illegitimate sources and could result in your site being banned or severely penalized by Google. If you’re only willing to pay for the cheapest SEO agency price, you will run the risk of hiring one of these shady agencies and causing more harm than good to your site. 

Top SEO agency prices can be up to $500 a month for local campaigns if you are wanting to rank high in your specific area of business. If you want to market nationally or internationally these prices could be anywhere from $2500-$5000 a month. There are options for you to get an SEO audit completed for your site that will give you a list of optimizations, and you will have to either learn how to complete these optimizations yourself or find a freelancer for help. This will help you reduce how much SEO services cost. 

Some agencies offer a trial period for their services where you can try the service for a week or longer without committing to a long-term contract, or they may offer a money-back guarantee if you don’t like the service within a given period. Take advantage of these offers to see which agency is the right fit, and be wary of agencies that aren’t fully transparent about their services. 

How To Avoid Being Overcharged for SEO

Two SEO agency employees looking at data

You might be looking at SEO agency prices for the first time, so it’s important to understand exactly how you can avoid overpaying for services that yield little or no results. 

Your first step is to learn more about the way SEO works and exactly what each service entails. You don’t need to become an expert in how much SEO services cost but you do need to have a general idea of what you are paying for and what kind of results to expect.

Once you’ve learned more about SEO agency prices and services, start to define your objectives and goals when running an SEO campaign for your business. Understand how many visitors you should realistically expect to visit your site from organic traffic and what click-through rates you want from your different pages. Giving an agency a set of objectives and goals will help align the service with your needs and make the process more efficient.

Knowing how much SEO services should cost, create a realistic marketing budget that your company can afford and that will allow you to employ an excellent agency. With an SEO agency price already decided upfront, it will be easier to determine if you are overpaying for a service based on your business’s needs. 

Agencies should be willing to provide reports for your business based on the data they’ve gathered for the success of the campaign. If you aren’t receiving regular reports or do not see this feature listed on the agency’s website, you’ll need to ask in advance to make sure you can analyze whether you’re receiving good value for their services. 

Make constant communication with your agency a priority and let them know this before you pay for the service. If the agency doesn’t communicate regularly, it could be a sign that it doesn’t value your business or care about your success.

Learn More About SEO

Learn the basics of SEO and understand exactly what services agencies are providing to improve your website’s search engine rankings. To learn more about SEO agency prices and services, follow our blog.