HOW MUCH SHOULD PAY FOR LOCAL SEO?

The question "How much does local SEO services cost?" Is best explained as "What is the value of local SEO?" The key to measuring that value is to understand how it works, what benefits it offers and the effects that your choice of an SEO provider can have on costs and on results.

The average of local SEO campaigns that we currently build for our clients ranges from $ 1,500 to $ 2,300 per month for a single brick and mortar location. These are some of the factors that influence prices:

Appointments: Listing your business and its locations in the top 50 online directories is a local SEO strategy. You may need up to 100 appointments, depending on the industry you are in. Citation management can cost between $ 50 and $ 150 per month.

Local links: the creation of authoritative links back to your site is another essential local SEO. An effective campaign may require a budget of $ 500 to $ 1,500 per month just for the development of links.

Locations: You can get efficiencies if you have a single website with multiple business locations, but there are still basic recurring costs to manage local SEO campaigns in multiple locations. Expect to budget between $ 750 and $ 1,500 for each location per month.

How local SEO is done

The basic mechanism is simple: established local search engine optimization tactics are used to help ensure that people looking for a bricks and mortar business in their local areas can easily find your business before they find the companies in your area. competitors.

Behind the scenes, there are a lot of moving parts that affect where and when the website of a local company appears in the search results. Some are relatively simple, are performed only once or take only a few minutes; others are more complex, must be built over time or must be done repeatedly. Local SEO tactics can be on-site or off-site, and both are necessary to achieve great results.

Here is a summary of what counts in local SEO campaigns and prices:

Appointments and links

Google not only searches the website for the signals it must use in its classifications, but also does so throughout the web. Wherever you find a place that cites your company or has a link to your website, the link to your company will be evaluated.

Appointments are references to your company that include your NAP: business name, address and phone number, and are used to improve local rankings. The value of appointments for classifications lies in consistency: all your appointments must be the same throughout the web to get the best results.

When determining ratings, Google also evaluates the value of links to your website that appear on other sites. If you consider that the other site is popular, authoritative and reliable (among some other factors), the value of the link to your site is probably high. The classification of your site then benefits from what is basically a halo effect.

Because the value of good links is so high, local SEO practitioners will probably spend a lot of time working to develop these links. Very high-quality links from relevant local sites are difficult to obtain and the search for them never ends. This intensive and continuous work will be reflected in the cost of local SEO.

How many locations do you have?

The more locations your company has, the more you have to spend to improve your rankings. Each location should be managed as a separate business from the perspective of local SEO, with its own consistency of appointments, unique content and pages on your website.

How many products and / or services do you offer?

Local SEO always includes the research of the keywords that potential customers use to find what they have to offer. Your local SEO costs are multiplied according to the amount of your products and services, since several keywords for each need should be oriented in their content and optimized on your website.

Your competition

Are you in an unusual niche or one of the few companies in your area that offers a particular service or product? If so, it may be easier to stay ahead of the package in local search results. However, if you have dozens of direct competitors, you will need a local SEO budget higher to stand out from the crowd online. You will need more links and more fresh and relevant content (on an ongoing basis) to improve or even keep your place.

The current status of your local SEO.

Several situations come into play here, and each affects the cost of local SEO in different ways:

• If you have an established business but a website that used low quality SEO tactics in the past, it can take a long time to eliminate those barriers to get good rankings.

• If you have had a commercial website for a while but have not invested in any SEO, you will have a small advantage, but you still need several months to obtain important local classifications.

• If you have a new business with little or no footprint online, developing a positive local presence online will not happen overnight, but you may see some initial gains if you do not have much local competition.

So, what should I spend on local SEO?

The answer, of course, is that it depends, and is based on the above factors and more. If your success depends on the ease and speed with which potential customers can find it online (even on mobile devices, when they are likely to make a quick decision), then you can not afford not to have a local SEO budget. Learn everything you can about your best audience and behaviors, which will help you decide how much of your overall marketing and advertising budget should go to local SEO.

Keep in mind that the adage "you get what you pay for" is especially true for online marketing. A monthly budget of $ 500 will buy you very little in the way of SEO, so you will not see much in the returns. You may not have to spend $ 5,000 either, unless you have multiple locations. For reference, here is more information on the typical price ranges for our local SEO campaigns.

The best course of action is to talk to a number of local SEO providers about what they can do for you and what they have done for others. Great results always speak for themselves.