Search engine optimisation costs

Once you've invested money in a business website, you need to attract visitors to it and to use the site as one of your key marketing channels. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be one of the most cost-effective ways to invest your marketing budget, since it can help to increase your ranking visibility and provide ongoing visitor traffic to your website - in particular, from people who may not know your company name, but are looking for the product or service you are selling.

The cost of optimising a website can vary widely, partly due to the type of website you may have, but also the company you employ, so it's best to shop around for some quotes and to understand what you will get for the fee. We've provided an outline of typical costs in our packages and prices section, but the best way to get a quote for your website is to request our FREE website assessment. This 'no obligation' review of your website will outline the work we would recommend and the costs we will charge.

The type of work you will need to consider for your site will include:

• Ensuring that all your pages get indexed by the main search engines
• Researching the best search terms for your market
• Amending the website content and tags to target these terms
• Targeting local search terms if this market is relevant to you
• Resolving any design or structural issues on your website
• Reviewing change to your ranking coverage and further SEO adjustments

You may also need to consider link building for your site to support your ranking performance (particularly on Google), and we recommend the use of a good website analytics package to track your referral traffic and to see how the improvements in search engine rankings translate into visitor activity on your site - because that should be the true measure of a successful SEO campaign.

We believe every business website should have good search engine optimisation to increase the chances of being found by searchers - other than those looking for your company name. SEO can be a gradual process that needs ongoing development with short-term and long-term targets, although this can vary depending on the website and the target market.

To generate immediate traffic to your website, we recommend the use of pay-per-click advertising. We would also suggest that SEO should be just one part of your overall marketing spend, whether online or offline. It is very rare that an online business can sustain itself just from search engine traffic alone and so you should view the investment on search engines as just one part of your overall marketing costs.

The Return on Investment (ROI) from a search engine marketing campaign will therefore depend on the market you are competing in and the value of your products and services. The cost per lead from traditional sales channels will give you some idea of what you can invest on the web and what returns you might expect, or require.

If you would like further information about SEO costs, or would like to receive a FREE website assessment and quotation for the search engine marketing of your own site, please contact us now.