Search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving rapidly, just like the internet. As Google’s core algorithm for ranking web pages continues to improve upon itself, we are seeing the art of perfecting SEO get exponentially more difficult.
Recently, you may have seen SEO agencies and practitioners raising their prices. Does that mean there are no more bargains on SEO?
The party may be over — here’s why:
SEO Expertise
The SEO practitioner from 2008 would have a lot to learn in 2017.
In the early years of SEO, Google weighed heavily on the technical build of your web page structure, keyword metadata and links to your website. A decade ago, that was the rough outline of verticals you would focus on in an SEO campaign. The guidelines were loose, and as long as you had your keywords represented in your metadata and more links than your competitors, you would often rank high on search engines like Google.
Fast forward to 2017, and you’ll see that the game has changed rapidly. Google has gotten better at understanding search queries through semantics, has the ability to judge relevancy in other sites linking to you, and is geared toward the user experience, rewarding technical enhancements to websites, such as site speed.
While this all used to be one person’s job, the need for a more diverse skillset in SEO has caused many practitioners to fracture into verticals of SEO, such as technical, content and even outreach.
Being technically sound is still at the core of SEO and helps search engines understand your website and extract the data needed to index your webpages for ranking. Content is king as Google continues its machine learning to understand humans and our needs to better produce the right results for search. Links still matter but are hard to manipulate, and that is never advised. What matters now is the quality of links and how relevant they are to your industry and brand.
Arguably, each of these elements requires different skill sets. Where you used to just be able to have one SEO person handle your web presence, now you need a team of experts in each area of SEO. As you increase team size, SEO campaign pricing must increase as well.
Staying Agile
In the early days, you used to be able to run SEO more or less on an assembly line. Small optimizations brought bigger results, and agencies and SEOs alike could scale their offering quickly due to a more cookie-cutter approach.
Today, you are in big trouble if you go one-size-fits-all. Each industry must be carefully evaluated through deep research and due diligence in every SEO campaign.
Staying agile is the name of the game. SEO strategies will shift based on a few things: Google’s ranking algorithm, competitors further optimizing their websites, and new competition entering your industry online. Staying agile is about evolving your strategies fast enough to not only keep up with your competition organically, but exceed them in rankings and website traffic opportunities.
Simply put, if you are not making strategic pivots to your SEO strategy throughout your campaign, your competition has a great opportunity to out-maneuver you.
Working with an agile team of SEOs will not only grow your organic traffic, but keep your SEO campaign from getting stale. Finding a team that can evolve your SEO strategy continuously and keeps up with Google’s ranking algorithm will come with a higher price tag because of the expertise as well as the extra time needed to be detail-oriented and strategic.
SEO Tools
Let me start by saying there is no SEO tool that will do SEO for you. On the other hand, there are a lot of SEO tools that can give your website an edge against competitors. Whether from better data sets to faster aggregation of data and keyword opportunities, SEO tools can save time and offer deep analysis for the user.
Not all SEO tools are created equal. Typically, the more useful the tool, especially if insights are built into them, the more the tool costs. There are some clear advantages to enterprise-level tools like BrightEdge or seoClarity. Both come with large price tags but give SEO practitioners deep insights into the industry and its competitors.
With the cost of quality SEO tools going up and more useful tools flooding the market every day, the cost of having the best technology for an SEO campaign has risen significantly.
Higher Value
As SEO continues to get more challenging, we will see the quality SEO agencies and practitioners raise their prices. Paying for the right people to do your SEO work that are experts in the field, agile in their approach and have the right technology to do the work, have a higher chance of making your campaign successful.
With that in mind, SEOs should set fair pricing that they feel can yield a return on investment for their clients.