- 2,584
There isn't a hard number associated with that.
Step 1: Identify the volume and difficulty of the keywords you'd like to rank for.
Step 2: Build out a site around those keywords and layout your site in a way that makes sense from a user perspective, but add content via a blog to create additional search opportunities.
Step 3: Keep adding content and "SEO juice" by doing things like adding high quality backlinks.
Step 1 is something most folks don't bother with, but it's sort of like building a house and then looking at the neighborhood. Not a great analogy, but there aren't a lot of great analogies for SEO. I typically charge for it because I get fairly involved, but some folks won't even do it.
Step 2 is anywhere from nearly free (DIY wordpress sites) all the way up to spending as much as you'd like. You can get something decent for around $500. A lot of what you're going to be paying for is quality content which means you can save a lot if you do it yourself. I'll typically write an article or two for folks, show them how to lay it out, then give them an idea of what keywords they want to be ranking for so they know what to build their content out around. If you go with wordpress you can easily change the look of your site down the road without having to start from scratch.
Step 3 is easily the most expensive part. Most folks charge anywhere from $500-$1,000/month for SEO and what they offer will vary wildly. There's no definitive formula for what it takes to rank well for terms and get leads, so it's hard to say how much it will cost overall. If you were buying a house the builder can figure out the plan, how much the materials will be, reasonably estimate the labor, and come up with a total price for the house. With the backlinking, social bookmarking, etc, the quality of the links and the volume of the services can vary a great deal. Some companies will charge $1k/month and offer about what you could get for $50/month, others will do a great deal of manual work for $500/month. One of the most common things I've seen is SEO companies wanting to charge for "whitehat" services which are basically manually doing the blackhat services. Whitehat is more expensive, but they should be doing different things than what my software can do automatically.
To make it even more exciting, when google goes through and changes their algorithms (which has been happening a lot lately), depending on the diversity of the way the SEO person doing step 3 has used it can put you back to nearly square one.
Rough numbers: $100 for keyword research, $500 for a decent site, $300-$500/month for SEO for at least a few months, then either scale down the monthly or cut it off. In exchange for that you may or may not actually get traffic, but that's the risk affiliates take and that's how they make their money. An affiliate doing all of the above can make $300+/day off selling their leads, so that's a part of why it can be so expensive.
Thanks for the info!
This would Quite a learning curve for me.
I wonder if there is a way to get leads locally as opposed to all over I guess the US?
