I just had an old client from years ago come to me asking me to SEO their revamped website. I quoted it, and then the client asked me why so expensive for SEO. I’m actually pretty cheap for real SEO services. Again, for REAL SEO services, I’m cheap. Everything less expensive than the amounts I usually quote for an SEO project (which will absorb at least a month of my dedicated and highly-trained time) is almost certainly a scam or a paper-thin patch.
Bear that in mind when someone says “for ten dollars a month, here’s an all-inclusive SEO plugin” – optimization needs more than a plugin. It needs a professional. Sure, buy the plugin, it will probably optimize some of the content on your website and boost ranks for a keyword or two. But content is only one of eight factors.
Optimizing a website for search is still very much a thing, but most firms that offer SEO services are actually offering you a tiny part of a large field, or something they’ve wrapped in the label SEO because it’s a buzzword. There are eight primary categories of major overhaul that a website needs to undergo during SEO, some of which can take months of hard work both by a development professional and by your own marketing team in-house. SEO isn’t a quick-fix, may require internal changes at your company, and it’s not something you should entirely outsource.
Here’s what I can tell you about SEO projects. Any real SEO project will take months. It will need cooperation between web professionals and your team. It might require restructure, new content, new relationships, and have some difficult hard costs associated with it. It will not cost you less than… ballpark for the average medium-sized business… $10,000 dollars unless it’s the quick fix variety or you’ve got a very old friend in myself or someone like me.
Yes, you can implement an SEO tool here or there, you can install SEO plugins and improve your ranking, but the vast majority of tools and even SEO professionals are scams. At least 80% of what calls itself SEO is a total waste of money, and anything with low costs is absolutely a scam – because REAL SEO takes a great deal of time and energy on the part of an experienced, focused web professional who knows the difference between actually useful tools and the scams that pose as the real deal.
The internet is THE most competitive arena in the world. If you want to get top billing in that arena, you have to have done more work than the next competitor down the list, and THAT? It costs time and money and experience and sometimes you have to actually become something more worthy top placement – you might have to actually optimize your company, too. It’s not fun to hear it, but you need to if your goal is dominating search.