If you are paying less than that you can be lucky and outsource it abroad where someone familiar with your field and talented will work for less. But, even in that situation for actual quality, you won't be able to go much less.
There is also an option of paying more, and that could only be justified if it’s a particular field. If your copywriter is already a respected professional in your niche, then you can expect blogs, articles, or materials made by them to cost up to $1000 per page or even more. Still, that goes more into the field of influencer marketing than actual SEO.
In this sweet spot, you can expect to get good pages, an interesting and optimized copy, and a functional funnel for your sales. Good SEO with a good sales team can make virtually any business a money-printing machine. But as always, that requires both time and investment.
Why does good SEO Cost so Much?
The main issue with good search engine optimization is that it has a lot of steps. So much so that there could be an entire book of what structurally goes into competently and repeatedly making a good online marketing campaign that will always be built around your SEO.
To set up SEO you would need to:
- Analyze the company
- Create a customer profile
- Analyze the competition
- Check the market niches
- Collect keywords
- Select keywords
- Make landing pages
- Imagine posting titles (for blogs and social media)
- Write copies
- Edit page media
- Optimize copies and page media
- Optimize a posting schedule
As you can notice, half of the entire work is just preparation. That is also the place where many people, especially those outsourced from aboard, will fail. This takes patience and time. And, unless you have already spent that time on previous clients you will need to spend it now.
Not to mention that two people in an identical industry, or even in the same niche of that industry, can aim for vastly different customers. While two household electricians might have an identical service and identical skill set, one will be more comfortable working with homeowners, where most customers will search online for how to fix something that is broken.
Oppositely, there are electricians who feel more at home working with property developers and property maintenance companies. They will aim for service names, materials, and part names – as that is what the customers will search on Google.
Why Can’t We Use ChatGPT for SEO Copywriting?
AI is amazing when it comes to making consistent, repetitive, and finite tasks. ChatGPT prompt can write out an answer to anything you ask. But, at best, it will be an unfinished answer and at worst it will be a wrong answer.
Additionally, even AI models that were trained on copies collected on the internet from your niche, in particular, will be trained on an average text – and the average is really, really bad.
During the golden age of affiliate marketing about a decade ago when every keyword-stuffed text jumped to the top of the pile and you could promote a product with 300 quick words many people outsourced that to teens in India and Pakistan just to achieve volume.
Now, even Google has a standard called EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. That means that you need to explain to your audience exactly what you are doing, why is it beneficial, and how it works. There is no space for needless fluff.
Just take this article for example – would you read 1000 words of me repeating how “Google ranking good – keyword important!” – I don’t think so.
Keywords, Structure, and Message
These are the three major steps in creating an SEO strategy. And, for all pages, it slowly morphs from a completely technical skill which is keyword research and implementation, to a completely artistic skill which is messaging.
A large part of SEO cost is the fact that those artistic parts don’t always go at the same speed. It is as easy to get writer’s block for a food blog as you would for a novel. But, unlike novel publishers, you as a business can’t wait for months for a blog to be finished.
This is where experience shines. Repetition is a mother of learning after all. And, if you have already written hundreds if not thousands of pages on the same subject it is very easy to place in something appropriate that will be both interesting, answer customer questions, and follow SEO rules.
Acceptable Content vs. Good SEO
There are legions of business owners who have a lot of content on their website, where each service and product has a description, and even maintain a regular blog. This is all acceptable content and they can’t figure out why nobody is coming to see their page even with all that content.
But that’s just the thing, content and search engine optimization are not the same thing. For good SEO, your content doesn’t only need to be good for the human audience. Also, it should follow some rules set out by Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Yandex. And for those working in Asia, being optimized for Baidu is also beneficial.
This means specific strategic keywords, good metadata, pictures, and videos that are properly sized and properly tagged, as well as titles and subtitles that will show search engines what you have covered and who will be interested in what is on the page.
Thankfully, it is possible to edit otherwise interesting content to be good for your SEO. On the inverse, keyword-heavy gibberish is virtually impossible to edit to look interesting. It is usually better to simply start from scratch. Paying for sub-par services seems as if it will bring your SEO cost down, but in the end, you will just pay for it twice.
Worthless Clicks and Keyword Stuffing
There is a dark side of digital marketing, and bad SEO which will do everything but optimize your page. This dark side will use digital tools, and now frequently AI as well. They will make content stuffed with useless keywords, and gibberish metadata, and will try to do everything all at once.
And unlike having an ineffective campaign, which sometimes happens even with the best product and marketing, this will hurt your business immensely.
Primarily, while you will get a rush of views and clicks in the beginning, engines like Google will quickly notice that your page is neither interesting nor specific, demoting you in results fairly quickly. This will damage your page in the long run.
Next, the people who do come to your page will simply leave. Because such methods use keywords that are only tangentially connected with your niche, a lot of people not interested in your services will simply click on it to click away the next instant when they realize it’s not what they were looking for.
Finally, the worst thing for your business is those clicks who don’t realize that they are in the wrong place quickly. They bring in junk leads that will also spend your time. These “fake” customers will ask questions and demand products you don’t hold. Sometimes, this includes even competitor products, or simply imagine products that don’t even exist.
Even the most talented salesperson can’t sell something that simply doesn’t exist. And they will spend time pivoting and creating solutions, just for the “customer” to be angry that they are not getting what they wanted.
Part of a Holistic Marketing Campaign
SEO cost should always be considered with the cost of website development and online marketing as a whole. In every situation, a holistic approach to marketing will create way better results. Individual campaigns are good only once the core SEO is finished.
To ensure that you are receiving value for the cost, always inquire about the services that are proposed and how much would they cost individually. That way you can know that you will receive benefits every step of the way.
Then, if you are satisfied with the services, you can always take out a few consulting hours to get an analysis and a complete breakdown of what will be done and what the KPIs will be for the project. For an experienced agency such as the Shoptimist team, we can check your website and content for as little as two hours and present it to you over a meeting.