What does the cost of search engine promotion depend on? An unbiased story for SEOs and their clients at the same time.
Scope of work on a website
Texts
More or less intelligible texts, when reading which do not want to flood the keyboard with tears, cost from 100 rubles per 1000 characters with spaces. Normal texts – about 300 rubles. Good – from 1000 rubles and more expensive, depending on the subject.
Design, layout, web development
The same with designers, layout, developers, only here is a different principle of pricing. Some performers estimate the cost in units of work, but more often – in hours. The minimum cost with the appropriate quality – about 500 rubles per hour. A clear result can be obtained within 1000-1500. Cool designer or developer with knowledge of rare languages and systems takes from 2500-3000 per hour.
I did not specify the cost of the work of the optimizer himself, and there is a reason for that. Unlike copywriters and developers, an SEO specialist has almost no tasks that are relatively easy to digitize and estimate. Usually he deals with everything: analytics, writing TORs, purchasing links, interaction with all performers and the client, reporting and so on. Sometimes in addition to that he writes content and makes changes on the site himself.
So the cost of the work of a copywriter, designer or developer can be estimated by the amount of work done. But the volume and cost of the work of a seoshnik to determine is often much more difficult. What seems elementary to a non-specialist may take several hours or even days – and vice versa.
Executor’s commission
This is the income that the executor receives from the project. Part of it is spent on overhead: taxes, service fees, and the like. The other part is the contractor’s net profit.
Most performers indicate the commission in the estimate: for example, 10 thousand rubles. This does not mean that their income from the project will be exactly 10 thousand. When calculating other points of the estimate always put some reserve.
For an example, let’s consider the costing of the same development or copywriting:
- Before you start working on the site can not accurately assess what level of performer will be required – and this is a fork in the cost, sometimes significant.
- There is always more work one month and less the next, and that’s normal.
- In fact, the contractor may earn more or less from the project than the fee quoted in the estimate.
Large, image projects for the portfolio sometimes even consider “at zero” or even with a small loss for the performer. “Just don’t quit, we’ll use your brand as advertising.” And that’s okay too.
There is an opinion that the larger the company of the performer, the higher the commission, that is, to order SEO from a freelancer, all other things being equal, will be cheaper than the agency. In fact, it is not a fact. Simplifying, the commission is what goes into the pocket of the optimizer in the form of his salary, and what goes into the pocket of the owner. For a freelancer, it’s the same pocket, but for an agency, it’s two different pockets. Hence the saying that two pockets are more than one.
There are no objective factors for the size of the commission. Everyone charges what they feel comfortable quoting and can sell to the client.
Reference environment
Another mandatory and significant cost item, which is completely at the mercy of the SEO-specialist. In the estimate can not fail to be an item “purchase of links”. If it is absent, the SEO is either lying, or incompetent, or inclined to experiment on you to promote without links at your expense.
There are many approaches to linkbuilding. Since no one really knows the algorithms of Yandex and Google, no expert can accurately predict the impact of links and select “guaranteed useful”.
There are only factors supported by experience and research: in which cases which links are more likely to help the site, which will harm, and which will have no impact. The market for selling links is huge: optimizers choose them on more than 30 parameters. What parameters to give preference, and what to consider “empty” – each SEO decides for himself.
SEO-specialist, hypothetically, can be forced to report on each purchased link – this practice exists. It makes no sense, except to simulate a storm of activity and the appearance of control.
The customer will not be able to check every link:
- They can be purchased not only dozens, but hundreds and even thousands – depends on the project, the age of the site, the chosen strategy and the existing link environment.
- Links can “flash”, that is, disappear and reappear. In particular, this is why adequate link exchanges and offer control of placement, and in some cases, and a refund or free replacement of the missing link.
- The very fact of placing a link does not give almost nothing. For the link to work, the search engine must index it. This can also be checked, even for free and manually, but it is long and tedious.
Controlling the linkbuilding process for the customer is a waste of time. It can only be evaluated comprehensively, as part of the entire service. The evaluation criterion is simple: whether the site pages move to the top or not.
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Age of the site
It may seem: the younger the site, the more money you need to invest in it for promotion. In fact, the effect of age on cost is a little more complicated.
A young site – a few weeks to a year – sits in the “sandbox”. Part of the experts argue with its existence, but I tend to believe that it is there. Search engines will index the site and may even rank for some queries, but there will be no full-fledged SEO traffic. When it grows up and gets trust from Yandex and Google, then you can expect results.
This is a good time to smoothly build up the link mass, eliminate all the joints of the one who made the site, and carry out the initial optimization. While the site is young, the correlation “more I invest – more I get” does not work.
Tactics for working with young sites: pay a little, do a little work too, buy links carefully. As a result, in a year we have a resource that is already competitive and ready for full-fledged promotion.
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The larger the region, the higher the cost of promotion in that region, all other things being equal. To promote a dental clinic in Moscow is more expensive than in Ryazan, and in Ryazan it is more expensive than in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
This is easily explained: the larger the region, the more companies in the same field, which compete with each other. There are exactly 10 places in the top 10 search results, which collects more than 90% of the traffic, it does not depend on the region. The competition for these 10 places is tougher the more applicants there are.
If there are only 11 dental clinics in the city, roughly speaking, 10 of them will get on the first page of the issue and collect traffic. You don’t have to invest a lot of money and effort just to avoid becoming the laggard eleventh, which will go to the second page of the issue.
If there are 111 dentists in the city, you will have to bypass 101 competitors to get to the top. Accordingly, the fight is hotter, and clinic websites are of higher quality, because more money is invested in them.
There are, of course, exceptions. The entire Chukotka region is much smaller in population than Moscow alone, but it is logical to assume that there are more veterinary clinics in Chukotka that treat reindeer. Accordingly, competition among these clinics in Chukotka will be stronger than in Moscow, with all the consequences described above. However, this state of affairs is rare.
Quality of the site
Before promoting the site, any performer does its audit – analyzes and finds a significant part of errors and flaws that need to be corrected. Each correction is a cost.
Logic suggests that a minimum number of errors should lead to the fact that promotion will be cheaper. But no, almost none of the performers in the market does not reduce the price for a quality site.
Another logic works: if there are too many errors, they are critical and expensive to fix, new items can be added to the estimate, which increase the cost of work. For example, if the site is made on a crooked self-written engine, you may need to transfer it to another, better. This work costs several tens or even hundreds of thousands of rubles.
Correcting errors costs money, and if there are few errors, the service doesn’t get cheaper – is everyone cheating customers? Some cheat, but mostly not. If there are few bugs, the budget will be spent not on the treatment of a sick site, but on the development of a healthy one. Other things being equal, requests will come out faster in the top at a high quality site, and slower – at a low. You as a customer is unlikely to get a discount for a cool site, but you will get a more significant bonus – fast results and payback of the advertising campaign.
To assess the quality of the site you can use the toolAnalyze the site. The service will show how effectively the site is ranked in search engines, and what elements require optimization.
The size and composition of the semantic kernel
There is an opinion: the larger the site, the more expensive its promotion. Not quite so: the cost directly depends, both up and down, not on the number of pages as such, but on the number of pages to be promoted. That is, those on which the seoshnik purposefully attracts customers from the output.
To be even more precise, the cost depends on the quantity and quality of the promoted queries.
Two key factors are taken into account: the frequency of the query and its competitiveness:
- Frequency is the number of times users have searched for something in Yandex or Google for that query;
- competitiveness – the number of sites that want to get to the top of the output for this query.
The higher the frequency and competitiveness, the more expensive it will be to promote the site on this request. The price is determined by the amount of work and the required number of inbound links that are needed for success.
Conclusions on the cost of promotion
Customers
SEO is really a complicated service. It takes a lot of work to make a website start to grow in the search engines, and not all of this work is easy to understand and digitize. An additional headache gives and the fact that SEO – non-transparent process, including for the seoshniki themselves. The reason is the participation of a third party in it in the form of search engines, they are not in a hurry to disclose the logic of their work and every year complicate the algorithms.
Therefore, there is no “one and correct” pricing system. Just as there is no single approach to SEO.
This does not mean that you have no way of knowing whether you have been correctly calculated the cost of work. Ask for a detailed description of the estimate, ask questions and check the answers with the logic that we have described. Ask to explain discrepancies with this logic, if any. This will make it much less likely to fall for an incompetent or unscrupulous contractor.
Optimizers
The quality of the services of a SEO can be judged only by the result, not by the details of the process. The client’s task is not to count every penny spent by a seoshnik, but to get the result and a return on investment advertising campaign. He’s a client, not a housekeeper.
I hope this article has given you some new ways to get your thoughts across to your clients.
