How much does SEO cost?

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How much does SEO cost, and is it even worth investing in?

Absolutely. However, it’s important to clarify what SEO actually is. SEO isn’t a one-time magic bullet that brings immediate leads to your website. Instead, SEO is a series of ongoing tactical activities to optimize both the content and technology of your website to place it in the search (and AI) results of your target audience.

We find SEO to be very similar to exercise: it takes patience, experimentation, and proper training, but disciplined work to optimize your website will keep it yielding your desired results as time goes by. While the time and dedication of SEO efforts are always essential, if you are looking for a way to see a more immediate increase in traffic, think about investing in digital advertising.

So what will it take to get your website into shape? It depends on how aggressively you want to grow.

Starting Small: Guided-DIY SEO

This level of investment is ideal for companies with smaller budgets and enough time and expertise to handle SEO tasks in-house. At this tier, your agency acts as a consultant, providing a monthly set of recommended tactics that you can implement to improve your search results. This can be a great way to get your company started with SEO, but it will only be effective if your team has hours of monthly bandwidth to devote to creating content based on the recommendations.

With US Digital Partners, this approach costs around $1,400/month, and it includes the following activities:

This tier involves:

  • 5-10 keyword/content recommendations per month

  • A comprehensive SEO Implementation Guide for implementing recommendations

  • Technical monitoring of the website

  • Access to a tracking dashboard

  • Monthly reporting meetings

  • Quarterly site speed audits

Getting Serious: Agency assistance

At this level of SEO investment, you equip your agency to take a more hands-on approach to drive your ranking efforts. You give them access to your website to provide an agreed-upon amount of technical and content support. This is a common approach for many small-to-middle-market businesses, as it allows them to have a healthy amount of expert-driven SEO support at a budget-friendly rate.

US Digital Partners provides this service for around $2,400 /month with the following activities:

This tier involves:

  • Focus keyword placement on 3 pages per month

  • The delivery of 1 new targeted blog post per month

  • 3 backlink placements per month

  • Tracking dashboard access, monthly reporting meetings, and quarterly speed audits (same as Tier 1)

  • Quarterly site speed updates

All In: Aggressive SEO investment

If one of your main marketing goals is to dominate both organic and AI search results, it’s going to take an all-in investment. At this level, your agency provides regular website support as an active member of your technology team. More importantly, they double-down as content creators to produce blogs and website content tied directly to the areas you are trying to grow in. This aggressive strategy will help you to create consistent SEO momentum while also giving you the freedom to adapt to new growth opportunities as they arise.

Because of the complexities of an all-in SEO focus, USDP will work with you on a custom quote for your specific needs.

This tier involves:

  • Focus keyword placement on 3 pages per month

  • The delivery of 3+ new targeted blog posts per month

  • 5+ backlink placements per month

  • Options for social media support, website A/B testing, local SEO, video SEO

  • An outlined content calendar

  • Tracking dashboard access, monthly reporting meetings, and quarterly speed audits (same as Tiers 1+2)

  • Quarterly site speed updates

Improving your website’s search ranking can be a big undertaking, but now you have more information to confidently approach an investment in SEO. If you are looking for honest advice on which tier is right for you, please schedule a meeting with our team and mention “SEO strategy recommendations” in the contact form so we can make sure one of our SEO experts joins your call.