Hello this is John Locke, and today, I want to talk with you for just a few
minutes about what is the right amount of money to spend on SEO per month?
Everybody that has a website or runs a business through their website and tries
to make money off of it will at some point be interested in SEO.
You're either going to want to do it yourself, or you're going to have somebody
internally doing it, or you're going to be looking at an outside SEO consultant or
agency to be helping you with that. The big question is how much money should
you be spending on SEO? What kind of things should you expect? The reason why
I'm making this video: it's a common question that comes up. I did happen to
see a colleague on Twitter lamenting this fact. They had a prospect reach out
to them, they [the prospect] had got one of these spam emails from an offshore company saying
they could do SEO for $300 a month. Basically, what I want to address is the
reality of hiring a professional SEO consultant or agency. Some of these SEO
agencies are specialized. They have a full team, they might handle other
aspects of it such as web design and development, maybe even social media. For
example the super agency out of Philadelphia, From The Future, does this.
They consolidated three agencies into one. For smaller businesses, if you've
formed your business in the last few years, and you're still trying to rise up
and compete against the big dogs in your industry, hiring an agency on that
level is probably not going to be your best bet. Those types of agencies are
best for enterprise companies -- companies that are doing millions
or maybe even billions of dollars per year. [SEO agencies for] some of those companies might be 30
grand or 50 grand a month. Let's address more of the middle to low ground,
because I think that's where most of you that are watching this video are
probably going to be at. When I say that, that could be anybody doing from six
figures of revenue a year all the way up to 50 or even a hundred
million per year in revenue. One thing I would advise: don't hire anybody that is
selling SEO for $300 a month, because you're probably not going to get a whole
lot [for your money]. The offshore companies, or even if they're here in the US, you're not going
to get a ton for $300 a month. Here's the reason why I say that. All the things that
go into SEO, all the levers that we can turn, all the dials that we can
twist, have to do with analysis of where you're at now, creating or re-purposing
content to make it better. Now, those are fairly standard. But, it's also going to
involve things like changing the user experience or the design or the
functionality of your site to make it better for your customers, and also
building out a robust link profile that has a bunch of high quality links in it.
If you're looking for a number, I would say do not hire anyone that's charging
less than $1,000 a month for SEO. Most people arre going to charge somewhere
in the neighborhood of one to three thousand dollars per month.
Most of our clientele fall in between the fifteen-hundred to twenty-five hundred
dollar range per month. Most of them are at the 2k a month level. The reason for
this is, there's a lot of things that go into SEO. it's not just manipulating the
words on the page. That's only one aspect of it. You still have to create content,
in most cases. Most websites are very thin on content, and they don't have
anything that people would want to link to. I hate to break this to you, but most
people are not going to build a link to your sales and services page. That's just
not how it's going to happen. You need to build content that people are actually
interested in linking to, in order to get those links. Building out content, building out
links, in most cases improving on the website. I've seen a lot of web sites out
there, they are ancient-looking. They're not mobile-friendly, they're not fast,
they're not on good hosting or anything like that. Some of you don't even have
Google Analytics installed on your site. And that only takes a second, but
the point that I'm trying to get to is -- if you're hiring somebody that's only
doing it for three to five hundred dollars a month, they're not
going to get very far with all those things [on the SEO list]. I've even had to tell colleagues
that don't do SEO, and don't quite understand how it works, that you
can't do this stuff for free. It's really not possible to do it for low to no
money. Building content takes time and takes talent.
Offshore companies, no knock on them, some of them are very good, but building out
content that sounds right in native English is something that takes a little
bit of skill. It's something not everybody can do. A good copywriter can
cost a lot on their own. It can be as much as some of these SEOs are charging
you just for a single piece of content. Doing design and development to improve your
site, that is also a part of SEO. We're going to cover that in another video later. But
design absolutely is a factor in SEO. Speaking bluntly, if your site's a piece
of crap, and it doesn't work on a mobile phone, people aren't really going to
be on your site very long, and Google is not going to want to reward it, because your
customers don't like it. And then building links. Some of these links you
can go out and get for free [if you work for it]. But a lot of these links that I found in the
manufacturing space, yeah some of them are for free, but first you have to go out and identify
where they're at. Then you have to go find them. [When it comes to getting links] some of them involve outreach. Let's say
you've built out a big informational piece of content. You still have to go
and do outreach to a bunch of people, and try and get them to link to it. Some of
these things are associations, or they have annual dues, but you still want to
be there, because you want to drive traffic to your site. So this is why I'm
saying we charge somewhere in the neighborhood of two grand a month for
ongoing SEO services. Some people a little bit less, some people a little bit
more, but that's about the neighborhood of it. And I would say, do not hire
anybody under a thousand dollars a month, because they are probably
underestimating the amount of work that it takes to get you to ranked. And in the end,
they're not going to be able to do Great Work, because they don't have the
resources to get it done. And I get it, you see AdWords all the time with people
saying that they can do it for 250 a month. Here's what you're going to get for
that. if they produce content it's either going to be, maybe an infographic, which very
few people are going to want to link to, or you're going to get some highly spun
content,which doesn't read naturally. And then you're going to get some links, which are not valuable links. These are going to be links on random blogs that
are literally Fake Blogs that drive no traffic. And these fake blogs are
basically set up for the sole purpose and intent of being link farms, which Google
does not like. Again, they're not going to drive any real traffic to your site,
which is something that you want, and is very important to SEO -- driving real traffic [to your site].
You can hire anybody [for SEO] from a person just starting out to a full-fledged, hundred-person
agency to do your SEO. And the prices will range
probably anywhere from 500 a month to 50,000 a month or maybe even more. But,
you get what you pay for. If you're doing anywhere from 500 grand to fifty million
a year, you really should consider hiring a professional SEO. Don't hire someone on
the cheap from a Google ad that says they can do it for 200 bucks a month,
because you're going to get what you pay for, and it might actually end up hurting
your rankings in the end. My name is John Locke, my business is Lockedown Design
and SEO. We help manufacturing and industrial firms with their SEO. If you
have an SEO question that you'd like to see us answer, put it in the comments
below, and we will answer it out for you in a video. Don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks.