Is SEO Expensive? It Doesn’t Have to Be
The common question people ask is
whether or not SEO is expensive. Well, it really doesn't have to be, but
the first thing we're gonna do in today's video is we're gonna dig into what are
some typical costs for getting an SEO specialist to work on your website. And then we're gonna talk about some DIY
ways that you can also start working on some of your SEO efforts by yourself. By the end of this video, you're
gonna have a better understanding of exactly how much SEO costs, as
well as how you can get started in doing a little bit of it yourself. All right, so first things first, let's
take a look at how much an SEO costs. To do this, we're gonna rely on
two different sources of data. The first one that we're gonna look at
is just some typical Upwork profiles that talk about search engine optimization. And the second one we're gonna look at
is we're gonna look at is clutch.co and look at the directory there to see what's
some SEO's charge for their services. This will give us a mix of people that
are freelancers as well as general agencies that charge for SEO services.
All right, so as we jump in here on
Upwork, what you can see is I'm just gonna go ahead and search for SEO,
and from here what we can see are just some of the folks that you can find on
Upwork if you are looking for an SEO. In order to see exactly how much
they're typically charging for, you can look at the hourly rate
section on the left hand side. And this can give you a better
understanding of just how much it might cost for an SEO based off the different
countries that they might be based out of.
So if I want to go ahead and start from
the bottom and work my way up, I can see that if I'm looking for an SEO specialist
that's less than $10 or so, I'll probably be sourcing my talent from India. And you can see that because the
first two profiles right off the bat are coming in from India. The first three are as well. However, if we were to take a look
at the 10 to $30, you're gonna see how this starts to change in terms
of the geographical breakdown. So here we're starting to get to some
neighboring countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as some other areas
around the world like the Ukraine. So something that you're gonna note
is that you can typically always find an SEO specialist regardless
of what budget you're looking at.
But as you start getting to the higher
end of things, you're likely going to be paying for folks from different countries
that might be stronger English speakers and or just specialists in particular. So now that we have a sense of just what
the low end looks like, let's start to take a look at some of the higher ends. So, 30 to $60 is really when we're gonna
get our entry level to intermediate level SEOs that probably have had
some experience working at a company. The reason why this is the case is because
if you work backwards on a $30 an hour rate, or a $60 an hour rate, that works
out to about 60 grand or 120 grand a year in their annual salary, which is
the typical salary of an SEO Specialist. If you wanna dig into more around
SEO careers as well as the salaries, typically you can check on my video
where I dug into whether or not SEO's a good career, which I'll leave a link
to the cards to in the top corner.
But looking here, what you can see is as
I start to move up in terms of the budget, the geographical breakdown changes a bit. And what you'll also notice is that
if I were to just go ahead and look at a profile of this Serbian SEO
specialist, you're gonna see a wide array of skills of what this person feels
comfortable doing from an SEO standpoint. So some common skills and tools that
people use are things like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Google Analytics,
Google Search Console Tag Manager, as well as tools like SEMRush or SpyFu. So what you can see here is that this
person likely has a little bit deeper experience than the person that we
were looking at or the people we were looking at earlier at the lower budgets. If I go back into that $10 or less
budget, if I want to go ahead and click into here, you're gonna notice how the
sort of things that they're referencing that they have skills in are a little
bit lower in that it's not really as clearly listing some of the specific
skill sets or tools that they are using.
It's a lot of overall SEO tactics,
but not necessarily expertise or familiarity with tools. And then the last thing we can
look at on Upwork is we can take a look at what $60 and above gets us. This is really when we're gonna get
really specialized in the SEO world. So if I go ahead and look at that, you
can see how this is where we're starting to get into the space of technical SEO
audits, which are typically gonna be more pricey than just standard specialists. And you're also gonna see folks that
are coming in from the United States, Germany, some predominantly English
speaking countries, or just countries that have higher cost of living, which
reflect the rates of these people.
So if I wanna go ahead and take a look
here, you'll notice how the higher rates typically reflects a specialization in
which in this case you can see, Yvonne specializes in Etsy SEO, which is a very
specific type of SEO as opposed to just generalized SEO that might be related to
Google search or some other search engine. All right, so now we have a sense of
how much it costs us in terms of Upwork. Let's now jump and take a look at
Clutch and see what some of the agencies are charging for SEO work. All right, so now we're on clutch.co. This is a massive directory of
different agencies that provide different services for businesses.
And the first thing we can do is we can
really just search for SEO or search engine optimization here and select that. And then from here I can just go
ahead and click find provider. From here, what you can see is if I were
to take a look here typically speaking their hourly rates the breakdown is
again, a very similar sort of rate in terms of the mid-range, where we're
talking about 30 to $60 an hour. But on the higher end of things, we
really start to see things like 150 to $200 an hour, as well as 200 to $300 an
hour, and in some cases even more than that, so, let's try to take a look at
what some of these $300 plus folks are potentially doing that might warrant
why they're able to charge so much. If I go ahead and filter by the $300
plus, you can see one of the top ones is directive, and here you can see a similar
story to what we just saw on Upwork. As you start to go up in the echelon in
terms of SEO costs, this is where you're gonna get specialized sorts of SEOs.
In this case, the directive is
all about performance marketing for software companies. The next one, we can look at dominant
your market with a team of SEO experts. And so what you can see here is that
folks are really starting to get into certain types of clientele. This one is focused SaaS SEO. And then when I look at the next one,
I can see that this one might be a little bit more focused on, let's
see here, searching in optimization so local rankings and reputation. So notice how they're specializing
in some sort of subcategory of SEO. All right, so at a high level, what you
can expect if you are looking to hire an SEO is that it is probably gonna
cost you roughly 30 to $60 per hour in order to get a quality SEO specialist. This is gonna be your typical one
that might have a couple years of experience, but if you're really
trying to go specialized, that's where you're gonna probably spend
anywhere from more than $60 to upwards of $300 plus for an SEO Specialist. Now that you know this, how can
you potentially work around that? Well, the best way to work around
that is to do some of this yourself.
There are tons of free tutorials on
Google, as well as on YouTube that you can watch to learn the fundamentals of SEO. The reason why I always recommend doing
this when you are starting to learn about search engine optimization is
because if you don't know the basics, then you're going to get skin alive
by one of these specialists or agency. If they know that you do not know a
thing about SEO, it means that they can pretty much do whatever they want,
and they can just tell you that, and then you won't know the difference
between what's right and what's wrong in terms of SEO fundamentals.
So what I recommend you do if you don't
wanna spend too much on your SEO budget, is do as much as you can yourself. The best way to do that is to learn some
basics, such as on page fundamentals, as well as how to conduct keyword
research and write SEO friendly content. I have free videos on this channel
that you can check out in order to learn all of this yourself. You don't need to pay a dime in order
to do that, and then you can play around with things and write content
yourself or hire a writer and start working through that process as well. But if you do that, what I recommend you
do is that you write at least three to five content pieces yourself, just so
you can get the flow of what it takes in order to build up the SEO reputation of
your site, or just go through the creative process of creating SEO friendly content.
From there, if you want, you can
definitely hire one of those 30 to $60 an hour SEO specialists just to get their
feedback or input on what you've done. That can be a great starting ground
because it's gonna make for a much more productive hour with that
person, as opposed to just coming to them and being like, "Hey,
what should I do about my SEO?" So there you have it, and if you're
wondering whether or not SEO is expensive, it doesn't have to be,
but at the same time, it is somewhat reasonable to expect that you can spend
anywhere from 30 to $60 an hour and on the upper end more than $300 an hour. Hopefully you learned a
thing or two from this video. If you did, hit that like button below and
then check out my video over here where I dig into exactly how you can conduct
effective keyword research quickly..
