SEO Time and Cost

Let's start with the answer for the market in general - the cost is about £350 / $500 for the front page of a simple five page site which should buy you:

Clean W3C validated code (HTML and CSS)
Code heavy reduction (code reduced to less than 80% of the text)
Image file sizes optimised to below 50kb
Images given alt tags and width and height attributes
Removal of any text/code that could be seen as scamming
Correction of (or adding of) meta tags
Create or correct your robots.txt file
Create or correct your sitemap.xml file
Review and refine within 3 months

Note that your home page usually contains content (such as the menu and footer bar) that is repeated on other pages so the home page usually carries the greatest SEO cost.

Now while this is called optimising it is actually more about stopping your site being penalised for not reaching "Ground Level" as we call it in our how to seo your website.

From here on in there is no limits on cost with some companies spending hundreds of thousands but in general it should always be remembered that much depends on your competition and what they are doing.

What work makes up SEO cost?

Beyond cleaning up your code and making it altogether easier for the search engines you can pay an SEO company to do any of the following which will help your site's performance.

Change your urls to be search engine friendly
Forward old urls (via 301 commands) to your new urls
Submit your site to respected directories such as the DMOZ
Take part in forum discussions where they can sensibly provide a link to your site
Write articles for sites such as buzzle/howto which then allow a link back to your site
Find RSS feeds which can be carefully used to bring more content to your site
Create RSS feeds from your site and promote them to other sites
Create and post videos on YouTube which allow for links to your site and promotion of your products or services
Find sites of similar content that you may want to link to (one way)
Create press releases so news and magazine sites write about you (and usually link to you)
Manage online advertising campaigns to bring more traffic
Continually review and refine your site's search engine performance

The cost of these actions greatly depend on the size of your site and the scope of the work (e.g. how many articles you want written) so it truly becomes "as long as a piece of string".

Time frames for SEO

Again it is difficult to be hard and fast because time depends what you are trying to do. At the time of writing this article there was no competition for "Wibbles Flower Shop" so if you purchased the domain www.wibblesflowershop.com and made a website you would probably be number one for this key phrase within a few days.

Thus many "guaranteed results" services promise you they will make you "number one for your company name" within a specific time frame - say three months. Most of the time that really is straightforward but see what they say when you tell them your company name is "Laptops for sale"!

The more competitive the keyword or phrase, the longer time is going to take and that could be months. Within Google Ads there is a keyword tool which will tell you how many people search for a certain phrase every month and how much competition there is for it (from advertisers).

So to be number one for "Laptops for sale" is going to take a great deal of time, potentially months, and resource (which means cost!). However it is not a blind process. You can follow how your site is improving via Google Webmaster Tools and make changes accordingly.

But what if you need to be top of "Laptops for sale" right now? You have after all got a business to run. Well the best move is not to go head on with the already established companies but consider a keyword phrase that has been ignored such as "london laptops for sale". For clarity we are not saying that keyword phrase has been ignored, it's simply to explain the point.

Time and cost summary

There are many services with a fixed cost for fixed services but really you should be looking for a company that will carry out the right service for your site. Otherwise much of the cost can be for SEO you don't actually need

When it comes to time much will depend on the competition for the keywords or phrases you have chosen. And the time factor on day one can change if the competition also start carrying out more SEO of their own.