The cost of SEO here in Canada varies significantly between companies and industries with the biggest contributing factors including the project's scope, services included, and difficulty. The average price tag for SEO will typically range from $400 - $5000 per month for most businesses.
To understand how and why SEO is priced the way it is, you must first understand that SEO is a process that consists of a broad range of activities. It's rare to see two companies let alone specialists pursue the same activities.
Each of SEO's various activities range in time and knowledge required. While there are commonalities between SEO projects, each website and industry has its obstacles. What may be necessary for one website might be a waste of time for another.
Here at Sharp & Bell Consulting, we help our clients understand what price they should pay for their SEO based upon their business goals. Some clients prefer to work within a fixed budget and plan projects within it. Others prefer to pay by the hour or purchase specific packages they feel confident will serve their needs. No matter the circumstance, our SEO services are entirely transparent and competitively priced.
How Much Should I Pay for SEO in Canada?
Your business goals, target market, and marketing budget determine how much you should spend on SEO. The more aggressive your growth goals are, the more work it will require.
Difficulty also plays a significant role in SEO pricing. Local SEO, that is SEO that focuses on growing your business within a specific neighborhood, city, or region is much less complicated than national SEO, which focuses on a country-wide audience. And if your industry or business is heavily regulated internally or externally, you can expect to pay a higher price tag.
While you can always find an SEO package like the ones we offer, you need to consider how your SEO will fit your overall marketing strategy before you invest in it. Contrary to what many will have you think you don't price and purchase SEO first, you budget for it.
You can't rely on SEO alone to grow your business. It can take months to see results, and no one can make any real kind of guarantee. That said though, if you blend SEO into your overall marketing strategy, you significantly increase your chances of achieving your goals.
Budgeting For Your SEO & Measuring Your ROI
Unlike a pay-per-lead advertising campaign where you spend x to get x leads or a pay-per-click advertising campaign where you monitor and maintain a relatively steady cost-per-conversion, you will need to budget for and measure the performance of your SEO in several ways.
SEO Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Include:
- Organic Traffic
- Organic Total Cost-Per-Lead (Total Investment / Leads Generated)
- Days of SEO to Organic Leads Ratio (Days Since You Started Your SEO Campaign / Leads Generated)
These KPIs help you identify whether SEO is impacting your bottom line. Generally speaking, SEO will require several weeks to several months before it begins to impact your bottom line. On a chart, you would see a massive increase in your Organic Total Cost-Per-Lead (OTCPL) with no impact to your Days of SEO to Organic Leads (DOS/OL) ratio. After several months, you would see a steady decrease in your Organic Total Cost-Per-Lead and your Days of SEO to Organic Leads Ratio would increase. As long as the OTCPL continues to decline and your DOS/OL ratio continues to increase, your SEO is making progressive strides. It's normal to see seasonality changes, but not for extended periods of time. If you don't see positive trends, you need to rethink your strategy.
If you are running Google Ads or Microsoft advertising search campaigns, you should also see increases in your keyword quality scores.
While most websites share some action items, yours will be unique to you. It would make no sense to focus on technical SEO, fixing minor errors that have no impact on your user's experience if you need to make changes to get hundreds of leads within the next few months. A good strategy tackles the action items with the greatest possible return. The best strategies often mean:
- Improving your website's speed and responsiveness on standard devices and browsers.
- Editing your website's code to help web crawlers better understand your website's content.
- Editing existing content to make it more engaging and include phrases people use on search engines.
- Creating new and engaging content that is rich with phrases (also called keywords) people use in search.
- Sharing engaging content on other related and reputable websites to earn mentions that lead people and search engines back to your website.
You must budget for SEO to make sure it compliments your social media marketing, public relations efforts, and pay-per-click advertising. If your target audience is on social media, you should focus more on your blog. If your target audience is on search, you should focus more on your service pages.
Learn More About SEO Pricing in Canada
To learn more about our SEO services pricing or get a full proposal, give us a call or request a quote online. We will discuss your business goals and budget and give you a quote by:
- Auditing your website to determine its needs.
- Establishing individual action items such as fixing an error, adding schema to a set of pages, or creating new pages.
- Pricing each action item or collection of action items based upon the time required, difficulty, and expected return.
We tick each action item off as if your proposal was a checklist, ensuring you know exactly what you paid for.
Getting a quote from us is fast and easy. It often takes less than 30 minutes. Speak to an SEO expert today and start improving your website for tomorrow.