Justified?

[thegiftco]

Can it be justified to quote £2500 for SEO on a site when the site only cost £1000 in the first place?

isn't that akin to paying £20k for a car then paying £50k per year to have it serviced

or am i missing something

[matt1biz]

Originally Posted by thegiftco

Can it be justified to quote £2500 for SEO on a site when the site only cost £1000 in the first place?

isn't that akin to paying £20k for a car then paying £50k per year to have it serviced

or am i missing something

Definately, though it depends what is included in the service. If it's for on-page optimisation only then it's expensive, though it won't get you ranking well on it's own. If it includes link building that will actually get you to rank then it's probably too low - depending on the search terms.

£1000 seems pretty cheap for web design to me, I've seen sites that have cost upwards of £15,000 to build, others that cost £5kpcm to run. Nowadays you're competing with people who have these kinds of budgets. You wouldn't open a corner shop and complain you can't compete with Marks and Spencer would you?

[Tim]

I'm not sure quite how valid your analogy is here. But I think there might be a sense in which the worse-designed (and therefore perhaps lowest-priced?) your website was in the first place for purposes of SEO, the bigger the SEO problem you've be left with and therefore(?) the more expensive it might be to fix the problem. Experts will doubtless correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think the time to cater for the needed/desired SEO is before the site is designed, rather than after. So ... yes, I think it's easily possible that a cheapishly designed site might leave an expensive SEO situation.

[peterjhale]

I guess it's like paying £40k for a plot of land and paying a builder £100k to make it worth £250

[Eagle]

If the SEO costs you £2500 but it nets you £20,000 - then of course it's worth it.

[thegiftco]

a very good point

[slicksps]

They're all good points but be careful about the services offered.

Your ranking in a search engine is governed by one thing... the search engine.

NOONE not working directly for the search engine has control over your ranking.

However, by ensuring the site is spelled correctly (in google's case) has relevent content and has proper advice to getting relevent link backs (on sites other than generic directory sites) then it should be ok.

SEO is not an exact science, if anyone promises page one in a search engine, they're quite possibly lying.

Personally I feel the price is about right, I know it sounds like a lot but a website is like getting a shop front in the middle of a field. A decent SEO company will setup and maintain the signposts, paths and should be able to give you decent stats to track where users are coming from and help turn those wonderful click-throughs into sales.

[CanzDesign]

Like the others I'd say it depends on the service they are offering.

And someone above mentioned having a cheap website might be part of the problem. A badly designed CMS website is reasonable easy and cheap to get, but as an SEO I can tell you that optimizing a database driven website is very difficult, and often involved rewriting the program.

When we had out CMS designed, I was a real pain to the developers, nagging about how it had to have a host of SEO features.

In fact I talked to one of the developers just the other day, and he said they had never done a CMS with SEO features like our one had, and in fact had turned down a job, from someone that was an SEO....Since I had made the job so difficult for them, it certainly has paid off though, sites built on our CMS practically SEO themselves.

I have never charged £2500 for SEO work, maybe over a year it could come to that, for extremely intensive SEO work, I generally charge about £950 for a weeks(60 hours) intensive SEO then £300 a month for about 3 months. Then re-access the websites performance after that. If you go to my site and look at the bottom of the menu you'll see a couple of SEO studies I have just written, you might find interesting, the budgets on them aren't anywhere near what you are talking about here though.

Lynn