SEO (i.e. search engine optimization) is a method where a website is developed and optimized to appeal to the search engines. This aims the website to obtain a higher ranking in the search engine’s search results pages (such as Google’s organic search results pages). The work that is involved includes thorough keyword research, strategic link building, local SEO, mobile SEO (which is to make the website friendly to mobile devices), on-page optimization, off-page optimization, technical SEO, competitive analysis, and more.
SEO has to be a project or a process because it is not online advertising or paid search marketing. The project would normally take a few months. Some SEO projects take 6 months to achieve its first stage results. Other SEO project may take 1 year or 2 years to achieve its full potential i.e. Have many of the website’s major project keywords ranking within the first page of Google and Bing. It means the business working on SEO for its website may have to wait for 6 months to see the first results, and a further 6 months to 1.5 years to see the best results. The return on investment (i.e. ROI) of SEO is considered long term.
Overall, SEO is a cost-effective traffic source/channel for new user/customer acquisition, when it is compared to many other different sources/channels that would typically involve an advertising cost. The factors that would influence the cost of a SEO project include the basic cost, your business location, the actual marketing goals (such as ranking, traffic, etc), the timeframe to achieve positive results (i.e. how fast the business expects results), and more. The price increase of the project would highly depend on the change of requirements of a particular business. Consider the following cases of SEO projects.
Case 1: A small business in your local area may simply need to receive better user reviews on Yelp or other local business review sites. This is how quite a few local small businesses believe a SEO agency like Safari SEO may be able to do for them.
Case 2: A small business needs to compete with its few major competitors on the search engines i.e. In the most simple words, this business needs to outrank the competitions on a few major product keywords on Google (and/or Bing). The job involves making sure the major keywords (with relatively good traffic volume) are all included with a few long tail keywords for each product. Once this is confirmed, the SEO project will have to move forward to the planning and execution stages. When the work is done for only the first 6 months, the expected results will be minimal. When the work has been done for more than 1 year and even 2 years, the outranking of the competitors would usually be possible on a larger scale i.e. The business now has many keywords ranking higher than the competitors.
Case 3: For a mid-size or a large corporate, the SEO work will become very time consuming and labor-intensive. For example, a team of copywriters have to be involved to write content on a daily basis, and publish all the required content on schedule. The process has to be done according to the overall SEO project plan.
