On the face of it, when you get the reply from the Online Marketing company that the cost of optimizing your site will cost an initial investment of between £1000 and £2500 it seems shockingly expensive. So why is it that the cost of this online marketing method is so high.
I suppose the first thing to do it to consider the cost of the procedure as a whole, rather than looking at just the upfront fee. If you do this you will very quickly come to appreciate that, although there is a considerable amount of money to be paid “up front”, this very quickly lowers to something much more rational. Most good search engine optimization firms can give a maintenance package, keeping you on page one from round about £15 per keyword per week. So if an standard SME has 10 crucial keywords they can in the long term, have them all placed on page 1 for a cost of around £600 per month. Contrast that with the expense of newspaper ads and TV campaigns, and you can see a very encouraging option.
However it is in initial weeks that costs can be higher. The reason behind this is the sheer volume of hours needed at the start of the process. There is the initial research into the appropriate keywords for your company and products. There will be work to do on your website that will require the company to work with your web builder. Finally there will be PR work done away from your site that will make the biggest difference to your Search Engine Placement positioning.
The way to evaluate these costs then is to look at them as a total package for the year. Add up the start up cost, and the ongoing costs and compare that to the amount of money you are already spending on marketing, whether that be Online Marketing or one of the other, more conventional methods.
One other thing to take into account when attempting to figure out which process is more cost effective is to consider the difference in output. How much trade does that pay per click or that newspaper advertising actually draw in. Compare that to the info that you will get from a Website Optimization Company showing potential visitor numbers to your site once you are sitting on page one in the organic area. One thing is certain, the size of the internet will mean that exposure on it far outstrips any other form of advertising. Even when compared to pay per click advertising the comparison works well as many searchers choose from the “organic” section of the Search Engine Placement results rather than the paid ads at the top of side of the screen.
So the real response to the question is that the service is definitely not expensive when stacked up against the medium term alternatives but it certainly is not a quick fix. The work necessary will take a month or two to take effect, but when it does the dividends should pay for the service tenfold. Just make sure that you make the comparison of cost over a year rather than being frightened away by the initial fee.
