There are seo companies, like Eckweb Designs, Inc. that cater to small and home based businesses, yearly rates average $7000.00 – much more doable for smaller companies.

At any rate, how do you decide which rates you can afford?  Well, like any advertising campaign, you need a budget.  You need to know what monies can be spent and you need to have an “idea” of what can be gained.  So, let’s see if we can break it down.

The first thing you have to know is the profit margin that you make from each client or sale.  I know, you may think this is so basic, but I speak with MANY small business owners and I’m telling you, the majority have no idea what their profit margin is!

There are many formulas that you can find on the Internet that can help you do this.  But I want to focus on the costs you would spend with SEO vs. the Return on Investment you would get.

So, let’s say you have figured out that each client brings in a profit of $50.00 (as an example).  So, the next question is how many clients would you need to offset the SEO rates from your SEO firm?  Or the cost of an inhouse SEO webmaster?

Of course, this depends on what you spend on SEO and as you probably already know, the rates for SEO services are all over the place.  But, the average is $20,000 per year, so we’ll go with that.  This then means that your SEO campaign would have to bring in a minimum of 400 clients in order to offset the $20,000 fee.  That would be an average of 33 new clients each month.  Is that feasible?  Can your business handle 400 more clients?  Are there 400 more clients in your area?  Looking for your service and / or product? Only you can answer these questions.

At Eckweb, our average is $7000.00 / year – so an SEO campaign with us would have to bring in a minimum of 140 new clients to offset the seo cost.  That would be an average of 11 new clients each month.  Again, is that feasible?  Can your business handle 140 more clients?  Are there 140 more clients in your area?  Looking for your service and/or product?

So, when you’re looking at SEO rates consider your ROI – what do you need to do to make up the costs for this marketing campaign?  How feasible is it that you will recover these costs?  The answers to these questions can help you greatly to avoid costly mistakes.

Comparing SEO Rates with ROI by Esther C Kane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at estherckane.com.
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