How Much Does SEO Cost – We have written in previous articles about what SEO is, how to get a quote for SEO, and we have already talked about some of the main activities needed to optimize a website, such as link building; when talking about SEO tools, we have partially touched on the topic of the costs related to search engine optimization activities, but not in depth.
Many website owners wonder about the costs associated with SEO. In reality, there is no single answer to this question, as SEO costs depend on multiple factors, such as the complexity of the website, the competition in the relevant industry, the level of optimization of the site and the available budget.
So let’s see together what are the apparent and hidden costs of SEO services, to what extent they can impact our budget and which ones we should pay more attention to.
Table of Contents
SEO Agency or Professional Costs
The first of the costs that we have to bear, in case we cannot “build” our website ourselves, is the cost of hiring a professional to work for us.
Agency or professional costs vary widely depending on factors such as:
- the hourly cost of the agency/professional
- the level of expertise of the SEO specialist
- the type of website
- the reference sector
- the “status” of previous SEO optimization
- the need or not to create links (link building)
These are of course just a few of the many costs that you will have to bear if you decide to undertake SEO on your own website, to which are added the costs related to writing the texts, technical work on the site, purchasing efficient servers, etc.
How Much Does SEO Cost in 2024?
If we have an internal resource to support our SEO activities, we cannot neglect the natural costs associated with hiring them.
If, on the other hand, we decide to take care of our website ourselves, our hourly cost, understood as a personal effort and, above all, as an “opportunity cost” (i.e. the cost of an activity calculated on the basis of the alternative to the chosen activity), should not be underestimated. For example: I choose to do SEO rather than take care of my store, inventory management, etc.
The time, in both cases, must be considered as double, or even triple, the time taken by a professional in the sector, in case we do not master the subject 100% and the result of our work is, except in exceptional cases, of lower quality.
Another important factor to pay attention to is the natural slowness of SEO. The optimizations implemented today can take weeks to have the desired effect, the phases of analysis, planning and implementation of strategies are necessarily long because they must be meticulous and careful.
It goes without saying that an SEO activity taken care of by a website owner or his employee can take months to appear in the SERPs if he does not have a good level of expertise in search engine optimization.
By using a professional or agency, the “time factor” is certainly reduced, while the hourly cost, in many cases, can be higher.
SEO Tools and Their Cost
One of the costs that cannot be avoided if you decide to undertake SEO activity without hiring a professional or an agency is that of tools.
There are many SEO tools, each with its own particularities, limitations and areas of use; there are cheap tools, free tools and costly tools.
When we talk about SEO costs in reference to the tools we use, it is possible to make a short list of the “Essential SEO tools” (the main ones are free) and their costs:
Here are some popular Free SEO tools you can use:
| Tool | Key Features |
|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Monitor website performance and index status |
| Google Analytics | Analyze website traffic and user behavior |
| Ubersuggest | Keyword research and SEO analysis |
| AnswerThePublic | Discover popular questions related to keywords |
| MozBar | Browser extension for on-page SEO insights |
| Keyword Planner | Find keyword ideas and search volume (requires a Google Ads account) |
| Screaming Frog (free version) | Limited website crawling for SEO audits |
| SEMrush (free version) | Basic keyword research and site audit tools |
| GTmetrix | Website speed test and performance analysis |
| PageSpeed Insights | Analyze website speed and optimization suggestions |
| Schema Markup Validation Tool | Validate structured data for SEO |
| Rich Results Test | Test your pages for rich results eligibility |
These tools can provide valuable insights and help improve your SEO strategy without any cost!
Here are some popular Paid SEO tools that can significantly enhance your SEO strategy:
| Tool | Key Features | Approx. Price (€/month) |
|---|---|---|
| SEMrush | Keyword research, site audit, competitor analysis | €99 – €499 |
| Ahrefs | Backlink analysis, keyword research | €99 – €999 |
| Moz Pro | Keyword tracking, site audits, link building | €99 – €599 |
| Screaming Frog SEO | Website crawling, SEO issue identification | €200 (one-time fee) |
| SpyFu | Competitor research, keyword tracking | €39 – €79 |
| Majestic | Backlink analysis, Trust Flow metric | €39.99 – €349 |
| BrightLocal | Local SEO management, online presence tracking | €29 – €90 |
| Serpstat | All-in-one SEO, keyword research, rank tracking | €69 – €499 |
| Yoast SEO Premium | On-page SEO optimization for WordPress | €99 (one-time fee) |
These tools offer advanced features and insights that can help drive traffic and improve your website’s performance!
Prices may vary, so checking the respective websites for the most current rates and plans is best.
These paid tools are not 100% essential, even if it is strongly recommended to use at least two of them: Screaming Frog and Semrush.
In the case where SEO optimization is entrusted to an agency or a freelancer, these costs will not be borne, nor will the costs (in purely economic terms and in terms of time) dedicated to training on the platforms.
The Content
Content, as we know, is crucial for a site’s search engine optimization. When implementing an SEO strategy, whether the site in question is an e-commerce site, a lead generation site, or a blog, the quality of the content is paramount.
What is meant by “content”? And in what sense do they cost money?
By content we mean everything we put on a web page, whether it is descriptive text for a product, a lead generation page, a photo gallery, a video or a blog page, it doesn’t matter, the content must be edited, managed properly and optimized from a search engine optimization perspective.
The cost of this Evergreen content can vary considerably, both depending on its type and the professional you contact.
If we take the example of a blog, the “typical content” we need is an article.
This article can be written by the owner of the site or one of his employees (in this case, the “price” is equal to the hourly cost + the opportunity cost), or by a professional writer who, based on a more or less in-depth document, provided by the seo, will take care of writing the text.
In this second case, the cost of the article, as a whole, will be composed of the cost of SEO + the cost of the copywriter.
The same applies to photos, videos, descriptive texts of products and/or product categories, and anything related to the content of a page.
The Costs of Link Acquisition
Link building is an activity that helps boost your SEO popularity .
Unfortunately, the costs of link acquisition are often very high, both if outsourced to an external agency and if the activities are managed internally.
Suppose you decide to outsource the acquisition of links. In that case, the costs will be the classic costs of an agency (or a freelancer), to which will be added the costs of individual links, which can vary from 30 to 10,000 euros, depending on the sector in which you operate, the value of the individual links acquired and the objectives set.
If the company decides to undertake link building activities instead, the cost, in addition to what has already been mentioned above, must take into consideration the time factor.
The time spent analyzing competitors, selecting the most interesting profiles, contacting the editorial staff of the various selected sites, writing articles and following publications, risks being a very influential expense item on the monthly hourly budget.
Link acquisition, unless the company has an in-house SEO, is always recommended to be outsourced, as it is a decidedly risky activity if not managed carefully and certainly costly in terms of time and budget.
Technical Optimization
When optimizing a website for SEO, it may be necessary to involve personnel specialized in website development, either for purely aesthetic reasons or to resolve problems (potential or existing).
Although many websites today are developed on CMS that are easy for even a layman to work on, many features useful for SEO activities, which can range from inserting custom canonicals to creating custom URLs, optimizing images and even managing servers, must be carried out by expert developers who can quickly understand where and how to intervene to improve the health of a site.
Whether it is optimizing Core Web Vitals, implementing structured data, or completely migrating a site, the cost of a professional figure capable of technically managing our website is crucial.
To the costs of the developer, whether internal or external, we must then add the costs of everything that the analysis activity requires, such as those necessary for the purchase of a high-performance server and the purchase of the various plugins/modules/applications necessary for the “SEO management” of the project.
All these costs cannot be ignored when talking about “SEO costs“, because they represent expenses necessary for the success of an SEO project and can represent repeated costs over time because, as the Google algorithm is updated, new technical needs correspond, to which it is necessary to adapt to avoid undoing the work of the previous months (not to say years).
Recurring costs: maintaining the SEO strategy over time
Tracking a website’s ranking in search results is an important activity to assess the effectiveness of the SEO strategy and make possible optimizations.
There are several platforms and tools that offer positioning tracking services, as we have seen in the dedicated section, but their cost for tracking a website is negligible compared to the hourly cost of the professional who will carry out this activity.
Depending on the site being analyzed, the frequency of monitoring, its depth and the degree of knowledge of the monitoring tools, these activities may require a few hours or even entire days of work.
This hourly cost, whether managed internally within the company or outsourced, is “unfortunately” necessary and inevitably leads to pages or entire sections of a website having to be corrected, updated, modified, analyzed from scratch.
From these activities we return to those we discussed in the previous paragraphs and in previous blog posts.
Is SEO expensive or not?
Yes, we can say that SEO activities require a substantial budget.
However, to split the difference in favor of SEO, we can say that the cost, by the very nature of the subject, does not follow upward or downward curves as is the case for consulting activities, but is rather “stable” over time.
It is important, in general, to understand that SEO is not a short-term process, but a long-term investment for online success.
SEO costs depend on the specific needs of the website, the client’s goals, the level of competition in the industry, and of course, the available budget.
It is therefore always advisable to invest adequately in this area, whether you choose to manage it internally or call on experts or SEO agencies.