As a business owner, you want to know what an SEO consultant will cost so you can plan your budget.
It's human nature to be wary when you're buying a service you don't know much about. Especially in an industry like SEO, where the bad agencies seem to outnumber the good ones.
How much does SEO cost in Ireland?
The quality & cost of the SEO services provided in Ireland varies significantly. Hire 5 different SEO consultants and they'll all produce very different plans and recommend very different ways to solve your problem.
An experienced SEO consultant, who forensically analyses your website and writes a detailed report with a list of recommendations, is going to charge you more than someone who runs your website through a free SEO audit tool and emails you the results (which is what many SEO agencies actually do).
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What do I charge for SEO services?
I have a sliding scale of SEO rates, depending on the number of hours you hire me for.
| SEO Hours Per Month | SEO Services Hourly Rate* |
|---|---|
| 1-5 | €105.00 |
| 6-10 | €95.00 |
| 11-20 | €90.00 |
| 21+ | €85.00 |
| Long-term projects | Negotiable |
For example, fixing an issue with your Yoast SEO plugin XML Sitemap might take 2 hours, so my fee would be €210.00 plus VAT.
Hire me for 20 hours per month for a 6 month SEO project, and the fee would be €1,800.00 per month, plus VAT.
There's a little wriggle room on the rates for projects that will last more than 6 months and require me to commit more than 20 hours per month.
How many hours will it take you to fix my SEO problems?
I know you'll hate me saying this, but it really does depend.
Different problems require different types of solutions.
When calculating the number of hours a full scale SEO project will require, I consider a range of factors, including:
- How well your website is currently optimised.
- Any shoddy work done by a previous SEO consultant or agency.
- The strength of your competition (in terms of the quality & scale of their SEO practices).
- The specific keywords you want to rank for.
- The quality & volume of your current backlinks (other sites linking to yours).
- The extent of copy rewriting and/or new content development needed.
- The amount of internal support you can provide for copywriting, graphic design etc.
- The amount of development work your website will need.
If you run a hotel and come to me with a budget of €250 per month, looking to rank top of Google for “best hotel in Ireland” and “hotels Ireland”, don't be surprised if I politely decline.
But if you have a decent budget, clearly defined goals and a good appreciation of the effort it takes to dominate the Google search rankings in a competitive market, I'll definitely be able to help you.
How to get a healthy return on your SEO investment
When SEO is done properly, it has the potential to deliver a huge return on your investment.
Time and time again, I speak to prospective clients who fixate on up-front price. They give no thought to the extra revenue and benefits a well-planned and executed SEO campaign will deliver.
Take an example of a project I completed recently.
The business owner first came to me in May 2021, looking for a quote to improve his rankings and grow his online sales. We spoke at length and I gave him my proposal.
After 2 weeks he came back to me and said he'd decided to go with another agency whose quote was much cheaper.
Fair enough.
In January 2022 he called me up and apologised. The other agency had promised the world, but had delivered absolutely no tangible results.
He'd spent a total of €4,200 over 6 months, but his online sales hadn't budged an inch. In fact they'd gone down.
Eventually we agreed a monthly retainer for an initial 6 month engagement.
I started by doing a detailed SEO audit of his site, and those of his main competitors.
I then forensically researched and analysed the keywords relevant to his business. I also analysed the websites that ranked in the top 3 positions for all of these keywords to see what type of content Google preferred.
Over the next 3 months I implemented a long list of technical SEO fixes and tweaked a lot of the content he had on the site already.
I focused heavily on the content and layout of his product category pages, and also rewrote all of his product descriptions to differentiate them from other competing sites.
Next came my favourite SEO tactic.
I researched and published a detailed “pillar” post, together with a few cluster posts with links back to the pillar to boost its authority signals. I embedded products within the pillar post to boost conversions (as blog posts don't tend to convert well).
His rankings improved dramatically. He jumped from nowhere to top 3 in the SERPs for a wide range of keywords. His daily traffic went up by 400% and sales tripled within 5 months.
Most importantly, the additional profit he was making after 6 months far exceeded the fee he had paid me.
His SEO investment had paid off nicely, and so could yours.