In general the price of your Search Engine Optimisation campaign will vary greatly depending on a number of factors. In Ireland, we typically see agencies charge between €50-500 per hour with prices being higher in Dublin than Cork.
But before determining how much SEO will cost you it’s important to recognize this as an investment and understand your ROI. If you don’t have clear business metrics to understand your return on investment, we recommend starting there.
At Kinsale SEO, our experience is working with client budgets ranging from €500 – €50,000 per month.
Want to know what your investment should be? Contact us to learn how we can help you grow your business through inbound marketing.
How Much Should You Invest in SEO?
How much you should invest in SEO depends on your goals, ROI, budget, and timing.
To figure out how much you should invest in your SEO it’s important to understand these metrics:
- LTV – The lifetime value of the average customer (how much they will spend with you over the lifetime of the account). This helps us establish a value.
- CAC – Customer acquisition cost or how much it costs from all marketing to acquire a customer at present.
- Goals – What goal are you looking to achieve?
Now let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you are an estate agent and have the following business metrics:
- LTV – The average customer purchases 2 homes in their lifetime in my market with the average sale price of €300,000. The commission is 1% (x2 home sales) so my LTV can be calculated at €6,000.
- CAC – Through my current marketing budget I get 20 customers a year and spend €10,000. This makes my CAC €10,000 / 20 = €500
- I want to grow to 40 listings per year. This means I need my online marketing campaign to cost no more than €10,000 and generate 20 new listings for me over the course of the investment.
The great thing about SEO is that once you rank well you can continue to rank for more keywords with a stronger investment and continually grow your footprint generating more leads and new customers year after year.
But let’s look at another example
If you’re a local pub for example and you want to rank #1 in the local pack results for “pub”, “bar”, “best pub in cork” you will likely have to invest less than say the estate agent to see results due to the competition in your market.
Why Should Business Owners Consider Investing in SEO?
If you’re looking to grow your business with customers already looking for your products or services you need to invest in search engine optimisation. Inbound marketing typically results in high conversion rates because many searches are already at the bottom of the marketing funnel and ready to buy. If your website ranks well for the customers search terms, you will get new business on autopilot.
Different SEO Pricing Models
Every digital marketing agency seems to have one of these pricing models. You should discuss your goal with the agency to figure out what might be best for you.
Hourly Rates
One of the ways we work is through hourly rates. If you have a limited project scope or limited budget with occasional needs, this is a great way to go. While you will typically pay more for hourly consulting you can also usually buy time blocks. This allows flexibility and will allow you to reach your project or goals on your schedule as needed.
Project Based Billing
Another way we like to work is through project based billing. This is good because there is no surprise billing for overages. In these scenarios you typically establish your marketing requirements and a fixed price project billing will be initiated. These arrangements work best when both parties fully understand the scope of the job and it’s well defined.
Monthly Retainers
Although this is probably the most common type of billing method for SEO agencies it’s also the most abused. If you sign up for a retainer make sure you both have very clear expectations as to what you are looking for in terms of outcomes or deliverables and reporting.
What Factors Impact SEO Pricing in Ireland?
The unique thing about SEO is that each market is different. With millions of websites ranging in size, authority, and design Google needs a way to determine which website should rank at the top of search results for a search term.
Here are the factors that have the biggest effect on pricing for SEO:
Competition In Your Market
In a small town with non competing companies that can be easy. But what about a Pub in Dublin? How does Google determine how to rank there?
The reality is that they use hundreds of different ranking factors to reach this conclusion.
However generally speaking, if you’re in a market with a lot of established competition it will take much longer to rank well in the search results. It comes down to that plus possibly increasing your investment to overcome these competitors.
Results Timeline
One of the unfortunate things about SEO is that if you want to see results tomorrow… is that you won’t. SEO takes time. Now even though it takes time you can speed up results with a stronger investment.
Experience
One of the unique things about the SEO industry is that there is still no formal training or certificates that would really indicate how much experience someone has in the industry.
SEO experts will typically charge more based on their years of experience which can help shortcut your success.