Is Search Engine Optimisation Expensive?

by Patrick Altoft on July 21, 2008

Search engine optimisation is charged at a huge variety of price points depending on the supplier and the services they are offering.

There are companies that offer SEO for £50 a month and there are companies offering it for £50,000 per month so what’s the difference and are you getting value for money?

First of all let’s consider linkbait

Linkbaiting is a service offered at an average of perhaps £1500 for an article including promotion. £1500 for a single article seems expensive until you analyse what linkbaiting actually involves.

Research
Unless the writer is 100% familiar with the topic they need to spend around a day researching and coming up with ideas.

Execution
Writing a quality article, sourcing images and perfecting the formatting takes perhaps another day.

Promotion
Linkbait articles need careful promotion by email and social networks. The time taken to source contact addresses and spread the bait via social networks takes 24 hours which is 3 days of time based on an 8 hour day.

UK SEO companies charge £500-£1000 per day on average so a linkbait article that takes 5 days to develop and promote costs between £2500 and £5000.

An average paid link costs perhaps £50 therefore to make linkbait a better option than paid links a £5000 linkbait would need to generate 100 links. A pretty low target for most accomplished linkbaiters.

Link acquisition

A brand new website (or an existing website without many links) has to carry out an intelligent linkbuilding campaign to catch up with their competitors.

It is rare to find an industry where you can rank at the top of the search engines with less than 1,000 decent links (using Yahoo Site Explorer figures).

On average a new link “costs” perhaps £50 either as a paid link (not a good idea because Google doesn’t like them) or in the time it takes for an SEO company to acquire the link by using linkbait or other means.

For a new website to acquire 1000 links in the first year the outlay would be £50,000. This is quite a large SEO budget even for an established company.

What do you think? Is this expensive?

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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }

rishil 21 Jul 2008 at 12:18 pm: I think this depends on the ROI that the company is aiming for. For big businesses that make huge online sales, the £50K mark is perfectly reasonable, and infact IMHO too low. Just compare your spend to PPC – most companies spend much more on PPC than SEO.

For small businesses this is going to come as a shock, and hence low tier services need to exist – but this doesnt mean that they are of poor quality. I get away with helping small clients dominate for long tail traffic which converts well with a good ROI.
Simon Dance 21 Jul 2008 at 12:21 pm: Link acquisition is a tough one (and indeed an expensive one), but their should be a clear goal with any link campaign, and particularly if there is to be a large financial outlay.

With a lot of my clients, I push forward ‘value adding ideas’ that create lasting value, stimulate natural linking, generate buzz and drive up conversions. I must admit your post (How We Built A Million Dollar Site..) really inspires and cements my outlook to link building but ultimately, and at least in my opinion, link building (and indeed all continue SEO) should be viewed as an investment, that requires continued nurturing and a certain degree of responsiveness from both the client and the agency (or whoever is working on the campaing). And while it can be viewed as ‘expensive’ it’s ultimately ‘what’ you are getting out of it.

Brian Clifton had some interesting stats on driving up conversion rates by 1% and the effect on the bottom line, and I remember reading about the increase in traffic from moving from position 3 to position 2 in the organic index, which only cements this view.
Charles 21 Jul 2008 at 3:29 pm: Expensive is relative.

£50,000 for linkbaiting is expensive for me, but worth it in the long run.

Do it right, and have the right site in the right niche at the other end of those links and you could easily get a 100% ROI in a year.
Rob Fox 22 Jul 2008 at 9:25 am: Patrick,

I thought I would drop you a note about this article on Linkbaiting – I am sure you would agree that there is a great deal of difference between buying a link and good quality ePR.

In fact we recently did a project for a small client of ours that achieved over 180 good quality links in just 24 hours.

This was not through buying links but having a great story to sell to media outlets – obviously this is not something that happens every day but there is no substitute for a great story in the media (And I don’t just mean Google news)

There are quite a few free online PR sites these days but we would also caution people not to use them all the time – a well placed article on a highly ranked site (say a national newspaper) is much better than 100 free links.

Many SEO specialists are actually damaging PR opportunities – I would caution anyone who is using an SEO company to ensure that they talk to their PR agency before they do anything. Understanding and establishing boundaries is very important.

As for cost – with the right story you can get the links for a fraction of the £50 suggested, it depends on the strength of the PR agency and if they work well with your SEO company.

Regards

Rob
Mikael 22 Jul 2008 at 10:20 am: I think the answer to this is best described in numbers. If the SEO work done will produce an increased amount of relevant traffic that will convert at the current conversionrate its all a matter of math.

If I could have SEO work done on one of my sites and the stats show that I would make another £100,000 by spending £50,000 I would do it any day.

But if the work would only just break even or maybe take years before becoming profitable then I would think twice before spending an amount like that.
Laymybet.co.uk 22 Jul 2008 at 3:43 pm: I can vouch for the fact that a new site requires many inbound links (400+) to rank well within the SERPS as I recently completed some keyword research into several competitors of mine.

One thing that struck me was the number of “bid for link” websites that are being used. I’m sure you’ll be aware of such sites. Typically, you bid an amount and these websites place your weblink on their top 10 list (on the homepage for example) so long as your bid is high enough.

I thought that this practice would be against Googles T&Cs but upon closer inspection Google themselves say that you can buy links so long as it is for advertising purposes (confused!!).

We estimated that one of our competitors have spent close to £16,000 on “bid for link” websites as part of their promotions and they typically spend £20 per “bid for link”.

Presuming that such “bid for link” websites are OK to advertise on then £5000 for 100 links is very expensive in comparison. I can imagine Linkbait being a bit hit or miss too.
Emo 23 Jul 2008 at 6:37 am: You don’t get in a niche if you don’t know what it is about, take 5 days and make the article and promote it yourself. Than with the 2000-3000 saved, buy some links to kick you off. Based on my experience I would make that back in 6 months easily. I’m staying away of the big numbers.
Jonk 24 Jul 2008 at 5:21 pm: Isn’t that figure a little high for an average paid link?
Alex 28 Jul 2008 at 1:55 pm: I think the good seo for long time is expensive!
vipey 30 Jul 2008 at 12:28 pm: very good article

its worth paying good money for SEO
theres alot of scammers out there

Paid links are a bad idea but linkbaiting is a great way to gain “natural” links
lindsay hogan 08 Aug 2008 at 9:46 am: I will say only one thing that its too expensive instead you can hire some genuine indian who will do it for you at very cheap rates with results. For getting more sale always do some research on internet and pay seo for keywords. Foreg. Give them 5 very very competitive keywords for which you expect to get unlimited traffic and sale. Then its legible to pay this amount for their efforts. I like this page and stumbling it here http://lindsayhogan.stumbleupon.com/ so that my whole SEO Group at stumbleupon can share you great post.
SEO Company India 25 Aug 2008 at 11:23 am: Affordable SEO is always around…nice post.
Search Engine Optimisation Chester 11 Sep 2008 at 11:10 pm: An interesting article. IMHO it all comes down to ROI, obviously in making the choice of which SEO company you use will affect this so a lot of research into who you use is recommended. Asking companies for proven and recent SEO case studies (with backup from their clients) is a good way to help define the right search engine optimisation company to use.
Mikel 12 Sep 2008 at 12:03 pm: SEO is expensive also due to the fact that it requires a lot of time and effort to complete.It takes quite amount of time to build good quality links and traffic ….
emo 29 Dec 2008 at 10:49 am: Very nice idea. This is interesting.