The average company is paying anywhere from $999 to $3,500 per month for Search Engine Optimization or SEO Services from a professional digital advertising agency. This cost is likely to vary wildly on a variety of factors. 

Some of the factors that affect the cost of SEO services are likely to include: 

• How competitive your market is
• The geographical size of the area you are optimizing for
• The vertical your company is in
• The degree of work that the agency is automating vs using humans for
• The technical experience and expertise of the agency you are talking to

The types of SEO Plans offered by agencies could include a fixed cost for the project, an hourly rate or a monthly fee. Even the type of payment structure is known to vary from agency to agency which can be good for the varying needs of different types and sizes of businesses. 

Some agencies like DigiSphere Marketing charge a fixed monthly fee for their SEO services. In this type of structure you should learn exactly what man hours and services the agency will be performing monthly for your company to justify the monthly fee they are charging. 

Another type of payment structure is hourly. This is often used by smaller agencies that don’t have a set or fixed methodology to their SEO strategy, or to entice smaller businesses that need to really stretch every dollar they have available. The key to this method is tracking and verifying the hourly work you are paying for. 

Finally yet another payment structure used is a fixed project cost. Some companies develop short term 3, 6, or even 12 months plans and charge a fixed price to complete all the world they laid out to do at the start. This is a method used by agencies that struggle to get companies to stick around long enough to realise the benefits of their long term SEO plans. 

The question of if SEO is worth the money will depend on several factors. The biggest factor affecting the value to your business is the current financial health of your company and if you can afford to pay fees now and see benefits later or not.

SEO services can take a long time to realise return your investment. For this reason it may not be worth if for your business to do SEO if you are in a financial position that will cause harm to your business to pay a fee and not see a return on that investment for several months, than SEO may not be the best option for you. in this case you may want to investigate PPC Services which can bring a quicker return, but will be a fee that you will need to continue to pay.

If your company can afford to invest into it’s future and you can afford to pay a fee for several months before realising the return, then you will be setting up your company for longer term sustainable growth. The SEO benefits take several months to begin to realise, but defending a top ranking position is much easier than obtaining a top ranking position. Therefor the investments you make in SEO will lead to lower costs and perhaps eventually no costs in SEO services while retaining all the financial benefits of top rankings month after month.

The services included in SEO package can vary greatly from agency to agency. SEO Services can range from one time on page optimization services to a full fledged ongoing content based on page and off page SEO strategy. 

The SEO services offered by DigiSphere Marketing include the following deliverables:

• Full Digital Marketing Evaluation & Analysis
• Keyword research and recommendations
• Top competitor analysis and recommendations based on findings
• Fixing any broken local citations
• Creating any missing local citations
• Fully optimizing and regularly posting on your Google Business Profile
• Full on page optimization of all pages of the site including Meta Title, Meta Description, Alt Tags, Title Tags, content optimization, inner linking, site architecture, and schema markup implementation.
• Off Page optimization including local citations, social profiles optimization, link building, disavow link campaigns
• GA4 & GTM implementations to properly track all conversion events
• Real time reporting and ongoing reporting
• Ongoing reporting and strategy meetings with your industry experts to make recommendations and continue to push the SEO strategies as milestones are achieved.

Above are just some of the deliverables found in a full service digital marketing SEO Strategy deliverable package. The benefits of SEO can not only assist with organic search engine rankings, but also produces higher PPC  Quality scores which can increase your ROI on paid search spend as well.

Many companies struggle to know what to look for and how to vet or qualify a prospective SEO Agency. 

Below are some guidelines to think about when you are considering hiring a marketing company to do SEO services for your business: 

1. Look at an Agencies Portfolio. Make sure they have experience with a wide range of verticals and company sizes.
2. Choose an Ethical Company. Make sure to read all reviews you can find online to see what real people say about working with them. 
3. No one can Guarantee Results. Avoid working with any company that makes a guarantee about organic rankings. 
4. Transparent Reporting – Make sure you will get 24/7 real time reporting that you can understand so that you can check on the progress of the company at your leisure.
5. Cheap, Fast, and Quality – As they say you can rarely have everything you want. In this case pick the one that is most important to you and focus on that. 
6. A True Partner – You want an agency that can advise you on all aspects of digital marketing as SEO is just one component of the bigger whole. Make sure an agency you are considering working with is well rounded and can grow with successes, failure, and most importantly, your needs. 

Now are really going to tax our ability to distill complicated subject into internet bite sized bits of explanation!

SEO is the process of manipulating your website and other online properties you can control in order to convince search engine ranking algorithms that your website deserves to be ranked higher than all your other online competitors for a given keyword. 

Whew, that wasn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be! But a simple explanation by no means equates to a simple job!

SEO Works by providing as many positive signals to the search engine ranking bots as possible to satisfy their criteria of determining which website is more of an authority than others for any given search query. 

SEO works by manipulating on page ranking factors and off page ranking factors that the Search Engine Algorithm’s are paying attention to and using in their rankings. 

There are over 500 ranking signals today used by Google to make the determination of which sites to put in the first position for any given search query. Only by ticking off as many positive signals for each of those 500 ranking factors can you have the best chance of a top ranking for keywords that are important to your business. 

The more competitive your industry is, the more people are showing Google they are the best. It’s that simple. You need to have a very comprehensive understanding of all the on page and off page ranking signals that Google and other search engines utilize and you need to know how to sustainable and ethically do the hard work that is required to achieve and maintain top rankings for your competitive keywords.          

The main difference between on page and off page SEO is that On Page SEO means manipulating any and all aspect that live on your actual domain (i.e. www.sample.com) vs Off Page SEO which includes manipulating any and all aspects that are included in Google and other Search Engine ranking algorithms that are NOT living on the domain. 

Long Term SEO Services mean the process of continually adding content and manipulating Google and other Search Engine Ranking factors over a long period of time (6 months or more).

The main difference between long term SEO strategies of different agencies are the tactics and amount of manual labor they are willing to invest in. Clearly the more of a personal touch you take with your long term SEO strategy, the greater the results will be. 

Many agencies do a lot of work upfront and then make all their money in the long term by charging monthly fees for SEO but putting clients on “set it and forget it” Type long term SEO campaigns that are either automated or non existent. 

A legitimate advertising agency will develop a content strategy over time based on the actual results they are seeing. Only by watching keywords that are being targeted can you see if you are increasing or decreasing in the rankings based on your SEO efforts. 

The strategy must be to bolster your on page and off page SEO with content that is targeted at improving your rankings for specific keywords. Our SEO Professionals let the keyword’s ranking and the relative importance of the different keywords inform the content that we hand craft for your web properties.

All search engines will always be looking to determine who is an authority in their field, and providing unique, relevant content in the form o services pages, comparison pages, FAQs, and Blogs is a great way to do this continually over time. 

Sharing this unqique content and linking to it from offline properties will help it become recognized by search engines. Making sure the content is optimized for SEO and links to important pages of your site will continually increase your rankings over time, providing more and more organic traffic to your website!