Cost of good SEO?

Can someone give me an idea of price range for serious SEO. I know that it could be $100 to $100,000, but I know there are a lot of people on this site that have used SEO firms so what can I expect as far as price goes? We are looking find a company that can do all of our page SEO and get us back links, etc. We are not looking for someone to manage our PPC. If this is just a stupid question that can't be answered, feel free to delete it. Thanks guys!

Not a stupid question, but I'm thinking that if you keep hanging around these boards for another week or so, you could probably just do it yourself for free. I don't really have an answer to your questions, but I can pretty much take an educated guess that most of us that hang out in the search engine boards either learned on our own, or are in the process of learning on our own.

you can get some serious seo from a few hundred bucks to few grand, depending on the company, size of organization and amount of effort involved.

in some extreme cases, there are some companies that are offering cheaper (less than 100) but I advise you not to go for them.
I cant think of companies earning from doing seo for less than 100 bux. (sounds dodgy?)


Get a seo who you can afford to hire- short term as well as long term.

this way, you can always go back to the same seo for help in future.

I concur - and am one of those.

I agree that it would be cheaper to do it our selves, but I just don't have the time to do it and its worth it to me to pay someone who is good and trust worthy to take care of it all. Im not saying that I have money to throw around because I don't, but I look at this as an investment. The reason I asked this question is because we were contacted by a SEO firm that has a great reputation, I wont mention any names. Their prices were $4000 for 2 months worth of on page SEO (session IDs, key words, meta tags, etc.) and $500 a month for off site SEO. Anyone have any idea of how many months worth of "off site SEO" it would take to build us a good number of back links and do all the submitting??? The person I spoke with was very up front about the prices and told me that they are in no way the cheapest SEO, but they are well worth it. How does this sound?

I take it you have looked into all the things we talked about last time and the company looks reputable. So the question you should be asking yourself is "can you afford to spend $5000 over two months on SEO?"

If the answer is yes, then the company will probably do a real good job and you will be happy. If the answer is no, then look into the real amount of time that is needed spent on your web site and what expectations you would expect within this time spent.

As always, i'm just trying to show how i'd look at it and my views are by no means right or wrong


//Edit - I mentioned prices and figures in this post and really shouldn't have so I have edited them all out. Didn't mean to do any wrong doing. appologies to all.

Yes, it was a company that you suggested. And yes they do seem very reputable. As far as price goes, what small business now days has $5k laying around? We don't. So I would love to be able to do it on my own but I don't know the first place to start? Ive submitted to every free directory I can find, Ive gone through the keyword density of our site using web position gold, Ive submitted to google, yahoo, and dmoz (all free submits), etc. But I did this all not really knowing that our session IDs were going to cause the SEs to reject our URLs. At this point several people have tried to explain the session ID thing to me but I still have no clue where to start with fixing that. We used a shopping cart software called Ablecommerce to build and maintain our site but it is all ASP based and I don't know how to change the code to make our session IDs go away. The site is also hosted off site so that causes a problem adding programs to it like mod re-writes. I have brought up this problem with Ablecommerce and here is what I get:

So I need a fix for this! I want to do it myself but I just feel like its a task that may be out of my league! Thanks for all the help though!

Redcell,

From my experience, these prices seem in line with what I would expect. In my opinion, a 2-month stint with a SEO firm is not adequate since it can take several (up to 6) months before you really begin to see significant upward movement in the SE's .

Again, this is my experience and opinion, but if you trust the SEO and you can deal with $500 a month, I would not feel bad about entering a 4 to 6 month relationship with an SEO firm. In my experience, we saw a jump in rankings on Google from over 1000 to 140 in the first two months, but we didn't break the top 20 until about the 6-month mark. (i.e. the SEO work that put us in the top 20 was done 6 months ago).

As we talked about before, going through the SEO process with a reputable firm will get you well on your way to doing a lot of SEO yourself, or it will further strengthen their value to your business and give you back precious time for other things, like vacation.

As far as freelance SEO's, I would agree with the price that Jessica gave out. That is sometimes what I will charge for freelance work.

As far as SEO companies, I always say that you get what you pay for. The company I work for is expensive, but we give you a huge selection of services and get results.
*not a plug

It also helps to find someone local, as you can speak and meet with them face-to-face, as that will help you see if they are a good company or not.

Aha - The prices I mentioned were pure examples - Not to be taken to literally but as a guide of what my personal opinion of what the site needs.



Redcell - I don't understand where your problem with session ID's lies?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.re ... 1&ei=UTF-8

True enough yahoo has you listed with session id's - but ablecommerce has that sorted and the listings are still going to the correct pages.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=n ... ball%2Ecom

Google doesn't even list your session ID's - the problem is your not being listed by titles or descriptions either, that doesn't have anything to do with session ID's tho - its a problem that I know for a fact a lot of sites in Google are going through at the moment.

If ya don't believe me -

http://www.ozzu.com/other-google-information-and-resources/site-disappeared-from-google-index-t39425.html

Posted only a few days back.

Uh oh...

Oh dear.... I see what I just did........

???



Jess,
I clicked on the link you provided to google and it looks like google lists our session ids to me...

Also, if the session IDs are not an issue than how come when you turn your cookies off and surf our site you get session IDs. Aren't the SEs going to reject the cookie and get all of our URLs with session IDs? Dont most SE bot hate session IDs? I really appreciate all the help, I know it must be absolutely frustrating that I dont understand what you are talking about...

Vetofunk,
Why don't you check out our site and let me know what you think it needs and send me an email: webmaster@redcellpaintball.com. I would rather hire someone from the board that know what their doing! That is if you are ok doing a little side work. All in all the final result we are looking for is that when you search for paintball, tippmann, spyder, etc. we come up instead of our competition. This shouldn't be that hard, other sites in our industry aren't really doing much to be competitive as far as SEO goes.

Am I seeing something different?



I see results like that ... no session id's ... ?