1. Rank Tracking
Rank tracking is an essential investment because it helps you determine if your SEO tactics are making an impact. Rankings demonstrate the success of your SEO campaigns and reveal problems with search visibility early on.
How much does Rank Tracking Cost?
Rank tracking is essentially free, if you don't need to scale – just use Google and start manually counting, or leverage Google Search Console’s average position data. There are even free ranking tools.
But, if you need scalable, reliable rank tracking, you should expect to pay. For example, an SEO package with 5,000 keyword queries, rank checked weekly is around $1,250–$1,800 per month.
→ Key Factors to Evaluate in Keyword Ranking Tools
2. PC (Google AdWords) and Organic Integration
Tools that integrate paid and organic search campaigns funnel keyword pricing and conversion data into organic search, making use of both data sets.
Another benefit: by targeting high-performing search terms through paid ads and organic search, your page has the chance to show up more than once within the same search results.
How much does PPC Integration Cost?
Google AdWords data can easily be extracted to compare to your top-ranking keywords in organic.
It takes time to collect that data and integrate it with your organic search data to discover opportunities and gaps. seoClarity integrates your Google AdWords account so you can easily compare data and find opportunities for integration between the two channels.
3. Reporting, Dashboards, and Analytics
When determining the current SEO health of a website, SEO experts use a tool to accelerate their output. These dashboards and reports highlight high-performing pages as well as pain points to adjust.
They also keep an eye on how competitors are performing in search. A dashboard brings this wealth of information into one convenient control panel for easy monitoring.
How much does SEO Reporting Cost?
SEO reporting usually includes the cost of time spent. Either an agency is supporting you and reporting is included in your SEO package, or you are using different tools and pulling this reporting together.
There are providers (like seoClarity!) that let you build a report once for each team or executive and have it sent automatically at the frequency of your choice.
4. Content Engagement from Your Social Media
Determine if you are reaching your target audience on all platforms by collecting data on content engagement. These tools track content performance and perform tests to increase engagement.
Creating content for engagement helps your business reach a larger audience, resulting in more backlinks and higher conversion rates.
How much does a Social Media Campaign Cost?
The main cost is the time investment of posting and monitoring your social media. At an enterprise level, this isn't typically in the SEO budget, but rather a team that you should integrate with to optimize your content for both SEO and social.
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO analyzes how search engines’ robots crawl and index your site. An SEO audit uncovers potential problems and gives you a chance to course-correct before errors impact your site’s ranking.
How much Does Technical SEO Cost?
A year’s subscription to Screaming Frog, an SEO crawler, costs about $200 a year. An agency may crawl a site regularly to identify new issues and determine fixes in a retainer setup for a minimum of $500–$750 per month.
6. On-Page and Off-Page Optimization
On-page optimization involves optimizing the parts of your own website that you can control, from web design and coding to page titles and on-page copy.
This might include alt-tags, page metas and even the URL structure. Off-page optimization refers to ranking factors that occur off of your website.
For instance, having backlinks from another website impacts your site authority.
How much do SEO Optimizations Cost?
The cost of SEO optimizations is based on the time you invest in completing them. Technology helps make the process faster to identify and implement.
Creating a scalable and consistent outreach process for backlinks requires investment in the strategy, investment in time for trial and error, and investment in content to create link-worthy pages.
7. Link Building
Analyzing the links that lead to your site as well as those that lead to competitors helps you determine opportunities for improving your site’s authority.
Likewise, a link building analysis helps you disavow incoming links from websites that may harm your business’s reputation.
How much does Link Building Cost?
A link audit and strategy can be done as a one-off project for $1k+ with freelancer help or as part of an agency offering. From those results, there may be several link building tactics to act on.
If the tactic involves outreach, additional tools like hunter.io to can help find contact info (starting at $200 plus extracts for email address).
If you're looking to get in front of traditional journalists, HelpAReporterOut is useful at $50 for the middle package. To pay a freelancer or agency to do the work for you, expect to pay around $50 for a quality link after a sound tactical approach and targets are established.
8. Keyword Research
Keyword research helps focus content creation on topics that your target audience and customers are looking for, capturing their attention at different points in the search funnel.
How much does Keyword Research Cost?
A keyword research tool on its own costs about $200–$500 per month, depending on the number of queries you need.
But you should also consider the cost of the time it takes to analyze keywords/topics and prioritize which to create SEO campaigns for. We are estimating this task will take around 8-12 hours every month.
In an SEO campaign, you need to identify a topic that your target audience will find valuable and create content on landing pages or pillar pages that support that topic.
SEO tools help strategists optimize pages for short- and long-tail keywords that drive traffic, while a sound content marketing strategy ensures the content reaches your audience.
→ What Are the Best Keyword Research Tools?
9. SEO Campaigns
How much does an SEO Campaign Cost?
It’s hard to put an exact cost to this because many parts of prepping your SEO campaign (i.e. topic research, content writing, etc.) lead up to launching and testing your SEO campaign.
Refer to the costs listed above to get an idea of what an entire campaign would cost.
