18-minute Read Time
Written by: Ryan Walsh
E-commerce SEO Pricing: Costs and how much should businesses be paying?

 

How much does e-commerce SEO cost in Britain?

A question on every e-commerce business owner’s mind is how much they should be paying for SEO services.

The reason is that businesses can go out to 5 different agencies and receive wildly different prices. Therefore this can confuse the business, they don’t know whether to go for lower cost option or will the higher priced retainer generate more sales?

Some agencies can charge around £1k per month, while other marketing agencies can charge far in excess of 10k per month.

It boils down to this: different agencies approach their work differently. Some stick to proven methods that Google approves of, such as using white-hat methods which takes a huge amount of time and effort. That’s not to mention copious amounts of caffeine!

However, some agencies cut corners, want to make a quick buck, or think that by “automating tasks,” everything will sort itself out. However, using low-quality SEO methods is a sure-fire way for the business to incur an algorithmic penalty.

Therefore for good-quality search engine optimisation to be implemented this requires skill, patience, and someone to sit with it until the right results are achieved. Therefore, this often requires someone to write a lot of content, analyse competitors’ backlink profiles, and sort out what can be a mass of technical SEO glitches.

In our experience, quotes vary between £1k and £10k for uncompetitive business sectors selling something very niche. The upper end can vary, exceeding 10k per month, in more competitive business sectors.

How do agencies typically bill for their work?

You can often hire an agency by the hour; however, far more typical is to pay a fixed price for a monthly retainer.

Sometimes the agencies want to lock in the customer for a set period, say, 12 months.

However, it’s also now common for many agencies to offer a rolling contract instead.

 

What work do agencies typically deliver?

Typically, we would say most agencies deliver work every month for a fixed fee. Which work is implemented very much depends on the agency that you choose. This fee can therefore include a mix of work.

 

The work can sometimes include:

• On-page SEO work
• Technical SEO improvements, such as fixing broken links
• Keyword research
• Content writing, optimisation and updating older posts
• Reporting on SEO performance

 

What about off-page SEO?

You can spend a huge amount of time building links.

Link building can therefore sometimes take up a lot of the marketing budget. This is why you may hear that some agencies will charge separately for completing off-page SEO. Now, you may be wondering what the benefit of such work is?

Therefore, do let us elaborate.

Backlinks, when built the right way, can help improve a website’s authority and relevance.

For example, if you sell, say, football items, football boots and items like that, well, links from well-known football clubs and football-related websites could get you on the first page of Google.

Earning quality links is hard work, but it can also be massively rewarding as well. A good backlinks profile can sometimes dictate how successful the e-commerce site is. The reason is simple: the businesses, the e-commerce stores ranking right at the top of Google, well, yes, they normally have the strongest backlink profiles.

 

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of monthly retainers?

Monthly retainers, we would say, are the most common way search engine optimisation services are purchased here in Great Britain and globally by businesses.

However, just because monthly retainers are something of the status quo doesn’t mean they are right for every business.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of investing in monthly retainers:

Pros

• Allows the client to budget their marketing expenditure
• Allows for a clear path to define what work should be implemented, and a roadmap to outline what work will be delivered to the client over, say, the next 12 months.
• Very time-intensive work can be planned, for example, revisiting old content marketing and updating it
• Allows the agency to record SEO performance, note improvements or where the marketing strategy needs to be altered

Cons:

• The agency may fail to understand the business’s product range and services it offers
• The client could be locked into a long contract
• The agency may assign work to staff members whose SEO knowledge is limited, leading to disappointing results

 

Not weighing up the scale of the work correctly.

A lot of marketing agencies make this common mistake: they sometimes dish out quotes left, right and centre every day of the week.

Therefore, sometimes the staff at the agency, whose job it is to provide quotes, sometimes does not conduct enough research before they offer a quote.

Sometimes, for example, it’s later learned that there is duplicated text across the site, on category pages and main product pages. The technical SEO issues are sometimes wide-ranging, from duplicate content to a large number of broken links.

Therefore, the point is that you will want to hire an agency that has conducted extensive research before offering a quote.

 

What work does an agency carry out day to day?

Technical SEO work

A large e-commerce website, or any size e-commerce site for that matter, can develop technical SEO issues. This can mean, for example, broken links that need fixing.

For example a substantial rise in 404 page not found errors, this can often increase the bounce rate.

 

Site migration

Sometimes agencies are used to work with web developers on migrating to a new website design. The aim here is to minimise the impact on the business’s organic SEO.

Local SEO

Sometimes an e-commerce store will sell products online, and sometimes also have many physical locations such as stores. Therefore, this is where optimising many Google Business profiles is also needed.

Keyword research

For each product range, keyword research will need to be conducted. This involves using tools such as Ahrefs to carry out keyword research.

Fixing indexation issues and managing the crawl budget

You and your content marketing team may spend several days creating a brilliant piece of content marketing. However, if that article cannot be indexed because, well, let’s say, a no-index code was left on the page, no matter how well written, it can’t be indexed. This means Googlebot will avoid indexing it, so a well-written piece of content marketing won’t appear in Google’s organic search results.

Therefore, the agency needs to fix any indexation issues.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console need to be set up.

Your agency should ensure that you have set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

These tools can tell you important metrics, such as bounce rates, the number of organic visitors, and, for example, time on page per page.

 

On-page SEO

A large proportion of the agency’s time will often be spent either creating and writing content marketing or optimising it. This means carrying out on-page SEO work, such as optimising meta descriptions to attract more clicks and improve CTR.

 

Pay by the hour

Many businesses also choose to pay hourly for search engine optimisation services.

Normally, the hours are booked a month in advance, and often bought in blocks of time. This allows the client to invest more during quieter trading periods, and perhaps to spend less when the company has enough orders and generating more sales.

 

The positives:

The positives of paying per hour are that the client can invest more when they want to. It’s not, therefore, a set amount that the customer is committed to paying say over, say, the next 12 months.

This allows the company, for example, to spend more when more work is required. For example, perhaps the company is launching a brand-new product range; therefore, more SEO work might be needed.

The negatives:

The downside of paying by the hour for e-commerce SEO is that, because e-commerce work is so time-intensive, agencies often want a monthly fee instead.

 

Why does e-commerce SEO take up more time and cost more?

In regards to local SEO, the number of competitors your competing with is often far less. That’s when compared with national SEO, where there is often hundreds more companies to compete with.

Therefore, for example, if you wanted to offer air-conditioning repair work locally, it would be much easier than implementing SEO for offering a national service, with engineers travelling all over the UK.

 

 

Here’s a detailed explanation of why e-commerce SEO requires a lot of work

Content marketing

When working with e-commerce brands, to improve their search engine optimisation the content marketing needs to be very high quality.

For local SEO, sometimes you may only need to blog say once a month; however, when competing with national brands and companies, this work needs to be completed much more often and be of much higher quality.

This, therefore, means more keyword research is needed, much more on-page SEO work, and articles that often have to be much longer in terms of the word count.

Technical audits have to be carried out on a more regular basis.

With, say, a local business, that has say a relatively simple brochure website, the technical audits can be carried out much more quickly.

However, with a large e-commerce sites, say carrying over 1000 different product lines, well, there’s a lot more pages that need to be checked. For example, you have to check for broken links that may have been found across the e-commerce website.

Then there’s “index bloat”, which means that the full e-commerce site may not be getting indexed.

This means the agency will need to better manage the crawl budget, to ensure important pages, such as key product pages, are getting indexed by Googlebot. Broken links are another common problem that can be flagged using good quality SEO tools such as Screaming Frog.

 

Link profiles

Regardless of how large your business is, you need to regularly check the quality of your website’s backlinks.

Therefore, whether it’s a brochure website, or say an e-commerce website, it’s crucial to check the quality of those links.

Too many spam links, or links which are lower quality, can put your website’s rankings on a nose-dive.

Meaning spam links, they cause massive damage and affect a business’s organic search engine optimisation performance.

However, your high-quality links and backlinks with very high DA scores can have the opposite effect.

They can, instead, massively improve your rankings. Therefore, agencies spend so long obtaining the best links they can.