What SEO costs, and what changes it

Search engine optimisation (SEO) quotations vary tenfold because the work does. The same three letters cover fixing a site that cannot be crawled and writing forty pages that do not exist yet. They also cover earning citations from people who have never heard of you. Those are different jobs. They should not sit on one line of a proposal. Before you compare two numbers, work out which of the four kinds of SEO work each number is buying.

The four kinds of work hiding behind the same three letters

Technical work fixes what stops a page being indexed or loading. Crawl blocks, broken structure, slow pages on 4G.

On-page work makes an existing page answer the question it targets, in the words the question used.

Content adds pages for the questions you do not currently answer at all.

Off-page work earns the citations that decide whether Google trusts the site in the first place.

Most small and medium businesses need the first two before the last two are worth paying for. Publishing forty pages onto a site Google cannot crawl properly is money spent on something nobody will read. It is the single most common mistake in SEO proposals we are asked to review.

Six things that move the number

1. How competitive the term is. Ranking for a phrase that three national brands are bidding on is a different project from ranking in one city for one trade. Same work, different scale, different number.
2. The technical condition of the site. A site that cannot be crawled, is slow on 4G, or was built without proper headings needs fixing before anything published on it will rank. Whether that repair is a small job or a rebuild is the biggest single swing in most quotations.
3. How many pages you need. One page per question you want to answer. The honest driver of content cost is how many questions your buyers ask, not a monthly word count. A proposal quoting "eight blogs a month" has decided the volume before it knows the questions.
4. How hard the citations are to earn. Citations are earned by publishing something worth citing, or by relationships. Both take time, and this is where a cheap proposal buys links that cost you later, when they have to be disowned.
5. How wide your geography is. A single-city business competes with a handful of others and can move quickly. A national term is a longer and dearer campaign, and it should be quoted as one.
6. How urgently you need it. SEO does not respond to urgency. If you need enquiries this quarter, that is a paid search budget. A proposal that promises otherwise is selling you a timeline it does not control.

Which of the four are you being quoted for?

Put your quotations next to this table. If a proposal has one figure and one line, ask which rows it covers. The answer usually explains the tenfold difference between the cheapest and the dearest quotation on your desk.

What this looks like for a real business

For example, a CNC machining shop near Peenya had a site built in 2017 with every page titled "Home", no headings, and a five-second load on a phone. Forty new pages would have changed nothing. The first two months were technical and on-page work with a fixed scope and an end date. Content came third, built from the fourteen questions the owner answered on the phone every week, such as tolerances, minimum order quantity and lead time. Citations came fourth. Quoted as one monthly retainer, none of that sequence would have been visible.

What to do next

Take the SEO proposal in front of you and mark each line against the four kinds of work. Anything you cannot place is the thing to ask about.

We do not publish an SEO price, because the same three letters mean four different jobs in different proportions for every business. We scope your number after we have read your brief and spoken to you, instead of guessing at one.