SEO Cost Studies
Distinguish Legit SEO Professionals from Web Spammers & General Marketers
What does SEO cost?
In the United States, the professional SEO cost for services ranges between $75/hour and $300/hour, or $750 to $5000 in monthly retainer contracts.
While you may see lower rates, those lowball SEOs generally use spammy “black-hat SEO” tactics that violate Google’s standards to temporarily manipulate rankings. Those are scams that should hurt or destroy your website’s traffic eventually.
For search engine rankings that will last, be cautious of anyone selling services for SEO costs lower than these. These ranges are based on four separate studies, cited below.
SEO Cost Studies
In November 2019, Ahrefs conducted a survey with 348 identified SEO agencies or freelancers.
I'm not sure how many of these were from the US, but they did segment out the rates for those within the US as follow:
Ahrefs survey of SEO hourly rates
Ahrefs survey: SEO monthly retainer
And way back in 2012, Moz did the last statistically significant study, surverying over 600 SEO agencies with these results in the US:
Matrix Rising SEO Cost is Customized
There are a wide range of SEO services any given website may need. Also, the depth of work needed on different aspects of our SEO strategy, analyses, and optimizations will vary wildly from one website to another. As a result, we analyze your unique site's needs and recommend a customized plan to elevate your company's revenue with a tailored SEO program. Just contact us to get started.
SEO Provides the Best Return on Investment
SEO is known to provide unparalleled value – the best return on investment (ROI) among all marketing programs. Internet search engines can drive exceptionally high long-term profits relative to investment in SEO efforts. Therefore, ranking in search engines is a highly competitive discipline. But only a small share of SEOs have the chops to consistently succeed.
To excel in this specialty, nothing beats hands-on investigation, analysis, shrewd research skills, and innate cutting-edge strategy. University marketing programs usually just scratch the surface and lack the detailed training needed to dominate.
Real-world SEO experience is vital to sharpening these talents. Skilled SEO work will build visitor traffic and can deliver tremendously profitable results with excellent ROI. SEO takes months of committed efforts, insights, and calculating tactics to gradually and reliably grow traffic, but that traffic is lasting when earned by the right methods.
Dedicated SEO Firms vs. Web Design/Marketing Firms That Offer SEO
We advise against purchasing SEO services from a web design firm as an add-on service. Web designers rarely have an actual SEO specialist on staff. The skill set needed to do quality SEO analysis, research, investigation, and strategy planning is radically different from Web or graphic design skills, or IT programming skills.
A web designer is mainly focused on website look, functionality, and the tastes of the site owner. By contrast, an SEO specialist is focused on algorithms, crunching stats, perfect website indexing and crawling, how searchers search, and Google's ranking preferences.
Sadly, websites are rarely designed to prioritize what users think about when they start searching Google. And most web designs fail to comply with Google’s standards or ADA standards.
We also caution against purchasing SEO services from a general marketing agency or Internet marketing agency as an add-on service. Marketing firms offering a variety of online marketing services rarely are SEO-focused enough to apply more than simple SEO principles.
Such generalist firms can offer you other useful and valuable services to achieve a variety of marketing goals, but it would be very unlikely that they could boost your organic traffic successfully like a dedicated SEO firm can.
Only a dedicated SEO firm will have the industry experience and insight to consistently apply the latest SEO techniques. Only a dedicated SEO firm will be able to deeply analyze your site with the technical experience to identify the great many SEO pitfalls that get designed into websites habitually.
Standard US SEO service rates are not cheap for an SEO professional, but SEO is still the best marketing investment when you hire an experienced SEO firm like Matrix Rising.
Learn more about our SEO methods, SEO theory, advanced ecommerce audit principles at Matrix Rising, or schedule a brief meeting to discuss your site with Michael.