How Much Does SEO Cost?

The following is adapted from Law Firm SEO.

A common misconception among people new to SEO is to think, I’ll hire a web developer and pay them $5,000, one time, and that will be that. But SEO is an ongoing process. It requires more work than a single web developer doing a one-time audit of your website.

So, if a one-time fee isn’t going to cut it, how much does SEO cost? The honest answer is that it costs as much as it needs to. It’s impossible to say that one size fits all, because it depends on your market, your competition, and the search terms you are competing for. If your law firm operates in a market with a lot of competition, it will cost much more to compete and take market share than it would for a firm in a relatively smaller market.

You need to ask, “When I search Google for lawyers in my market today, who shows up?” The law firms currently ranking highest in your market are your competition, whether you like it or not, and they’ve had a head start. It’s safe to assume they’ve invested in their SEO for several years already, and you will likely need to spend as much or more to take their market share. Alternatively, you might be able to use more advanced strategies to move the needle faster.

Some search terms may be so competitive that it’s not even realistic to compete for them. For example, if someone offered me $5 million to rank number one on Google for the keyword “mesothelioma lawyer” in three months, I would have to tell them that it can’t be done. That amount of money would not cover the work required to outrank the current leaders in that space within that time period. Google just doesn’t work that way.

There are also domains that have so much popularity and authority that they’re nearly impossible to outrank. For example, there isn’t enough money in the world to try to compete with Wikipedia at this point. They’ve laid far too much groundwork and have millions of pages of content indexed on Google.?

Fortunately, you don’t need to compete with Wikipedia—you only need to compete with other law firms in your specific market. Your law firm likely has several competitors that are taking SEO more seriously, and they’re the ones fighting for the top three positions. That’s the goal: to rank in the top three positions for your target keywords, or at the very least make it to the first page. As a popular SEO joke goes: “Where do you hide dead bodies? On the second page of Google.”

My kids might cringe at that joke too, but statistics show that click-through rates drop dramatically the further down the search results you go. By the time a webpage gets pushed to the second page, the traffic drops to almost zero. Most users will rephrase their search query and get a fresh list of results instead of going to the second page, so it’s critical to secure one of those top three spots.

Your competitors will play a significant role in how much you’ll need to spend on SEO. Remember, they’re the ones you need to outrank. However, if you operate in a smaller or less competitive market, SEO might cost less than you expect. For example, maybe your law firm does estate planning in Boca Raton, and you find that the market is wide open. Nobody has dominated that space online.?

In this scenario, a few thousand dollars per month might be enough to develop a strategy to secure the top search result for “Boca Raton estate planning lawyer” and start signing more cases and earning more revenue for your firm. Meanwhile, that same investment wouldn’t be enough to impact a firm trying to compete for the keyword “Orlando personal injury lawyer,” where you have some of the largest law firms in the country spending millions of dollars per month in marketing. Whatever you need to spend per month to compete in your market might seem high, but done right, SEO can deliver a significant return on your investment.

As a word of warning, if an SEO company offers you set pricing structures along the lines of “bronze, silver, or gold,” I would be cautious. One size does not fit all, and to realistically cover the scope of the work required to compete, pricing expectations for SEO should be customized, depending on your market and competition.

For more advice on SEO costs, you can find Law Firm SEO on Amazon.

Jason Hennessey is an author, entrepreneur, and internationally recognized SEO expert focused on dissecting, demystifying, and reverse-engineering the algorithms behind the world’s most popular search engines. He’s the CEO and Founder of Hennessey Digital, a multimillion-dollar digital marketing agency recognized by Inc. as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. A digital search marketing correspondent for the Washington Post, Fox Business, CNBC, and CBS News, Jason is also a highly sought-after public speaker, prolific angel investor, and an active board member of several nonprofits. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Bridget, and their three children.