The Reality of Costs for Small Business SEO

So, what about the cost of small business SEO? What should a small business expect to pay when hiring an SEO consultant? And further, what are your expectations based on those costs?
Most people when considering SEO, have done their homework and have searched pretty extensively on the web to learn as much as they can about costs concerning their expectations in relation to the ROI of such an SEO campaign.

And for the most part what they run into is this premise -- that for the most part, companies that offer SEO services charge an arm and a leg, usually monthly (anywhere from $500-$5000/monthly) and many don’t provide any kind of guarantee on results! All too common a thread we hear from prospective clients and we'd like to clear up some of those misconceptions for small business owners and managers.

First, that the cost of doing business with an SEO practitioner, depends on that practitioners style of SEO campaign. Here at FRESH TRAFFIC, we product both a client's on-page and off-page SEO for their website. That will mean that yes, we will be making small changes to the website with regards to our keyword analysis based on your own website channel. This also means that we will of course run ALL changes by the site owner/team to ensure that our changes are not going to be about breaking your brand positioning nor your LOCAL business center listings either. We've done this for many of our clients and we know after 15 years exactly what works today...and our clients have gained new business from our SEO campaigns on their behalf!

We charge for 4 different types of SEO Campaign programs, depending on the length of time needed to run your own program -- and that means that your total costs are known up front when we first complete our paperwork. There are NO further costs or add-ons or extras at all...ever. You can count on the price we will be charging from day one and there has never been an exception to that rule, ever!

Are there some small businesses who simply can not afford our most inexpensive program? Of course. If that’s you, then you’ll have to spend time learning the basics of SEO yourself. There are a lot of great blogs and web sites where SEO knowledge is shared freely, not to mention several SEO e-books that cost less than our basic programs and offer terrific information...investigate via Amazon for instance or do a Google search for SEO forums to learn more.

Any small business owner, however should concentrate on ROI, not the costs. That is what's most important to your business, the cost of a new SEO Campaign, or the revenue it brings in to your business? If you spend $500 a month and in the first 6 months see only minimal incremental increases in revenues, is that what you'd expect for the full 12 month program? What about after a full year of SEO work, has the revenue stream ramped up enough to show that such an SEO program was a real asset to your new business from all the new traffic and revenue conversions and only you, the small business owner can answer that!

Let’s use an accounting practice as an example:

For a local Accounting firm, each client's annual account brings in about $2,000 income, on average. That accounting firm hires an SEO consultant to SEO their web site and make sure they're listed on all the right LOCAL search engines. This takes about twelve months and costs that accounting firm say $12,000 based on a $1,000 month SEO Campaign program.
Over the next year, that accounting firm starts to get a lot more leads/new clients.

Other local small companies are also finding them online and sending referrals. Here are three scenarios:

If the accountant firm gains one more client every two months this would be a first year breakeven point...plus the referrals that such a program brings in too!
If they starts gains one more client every month, that’s an extra $24,000 per year or an ROI of 100%!
If they gain two additional clients per month, that’s $48,000 more income or an ROI of 400%!

All that from a $12,000 investment over the annual SEO program...that initial $1,000 per month seemed like a lot at the start, but it was money well spent...and it's easy to see that the money spent on an SEO Campaign program is NOT NEARLY as important to a small business as the revenues earned!
Lastly, the fact that no SEO firm can ever guarantee results....and why is that? Simple really, any search engine could change their algorithms that rank websites any time, today, tomorrow or next week. Your competition could be investing more on their own SEO Campaigns that your business is and that too must be considered. You see, all SEO is done "live" ie "real-time" and that means that there are so many factors outside of an SEO firms control, that not a single one of us can guarantee anything. What we can do, and we do for our clients is to show them how we will implement SEO factors both on-page and off-page to gain more traffic than you are getting now and that should increase revenues from organic search SEO...which is about as close to a guarantee as FRESH TRAFFIC could ever give.

So to summarize, when considering SEO and what it should cost, please keep this in mind ~
Any small business owner will need to invest either time or money.
Any small business owner will usually get what they pay for; if you spend only a little time or a little money, you can expect little success.
There are no shortcuts to true, long-lasting SEO Campaign success.
Nothing matters more to a small business owner than ROI.
If small business owners spend their money wisely on SEO, it should bring back returns that are substantially higher than the costs.