Positioning - A cost you should reckon with

Positioning cost This is a frequently searched phrase on the internet. Related to this is the fact that we are increasingly finding it worthwhile to increase our online visibility - the gains from search engine visibility of your shop/blog/domain are obvious. The costs you should expect to face are no longer. In this post, I'll explain how much and what you're actually paying for when commissioning a campaign SEO.

Positioning cost - cheap offers

If you're in e-commerce, then at least a few times you've received an email offering a super deal for a positioning:

• "10 links and you'll be in the Top10",
• "£300 gross. Results after the first month",
• "50 cents net per link on the forum",
• "we guarantee immediate results",
• 'whispering for £100 - super results'.

You know what, you can throw them in the bin straight away. At least for a couple of reasons. The first and most basic one is that you are most likely dealing with a company that wants to rip you off, send you invoices and present you with fictitious screen shots of your supposedly increasing positions in the organics. It is impossible to do an SEO campaign at these costs. And yet that is what this is all about.

After all, you don't mean burning up your pages with hundreds of links from dodgy sources, do you? I've mentioned this many times, but I'll say it again: by spending £300 on links from Bangladesh, you're not really investing £300. You are simply throwing 3 hundred in the bin and waiting for the robot to ban your domain in the worst case, and in the best case it will simply not move anything, because the authority of the sources of these links is mediocre. And repairing the damage caused by the penalties from the robot is already a cost counted in thousands of zlotys. It's like betting on a car from a junkyard, only to add to it later for each repair, rather than true and effective positioning.

Be interested in where the links are coming from. 100 links from discussion forums is a completely different power than 100 no-follow links from blogs on WordPress. 100 links acquired from bloggers in a related industry is yet another tale.

300 zloty is not a cost with which to reach the top 10. And yet the top 20 does not sell. So why go into this business at all? Look at it this way: 300 zloty times 12 months is 3600 zloty. Just do something else with them.

Unless you care about investing in your own profits and understand how SEO works from the inside out

Positioning depends on the actions of your competitors

Positioning, like any service, does not lend itself to clear-cut pricing. Do you think I'm spinning something? No. The point is that a niche shop selling decorative Christmas trees has to pay a different cost, a children's toy shop a different one, and the furniture industry, where the top5 are shops with totally unaffordable budgets (like Agata Meble or Bodzio), has to pay a different one.

It all comes down to how strong the competition is and how much they are investing. You not only have to invest similar resources to them - you have to catch up with them in the first place. If you run the aforementioned decorative Christmas tree shop that ranks for unpopular phrases then you probably just need to push it, spice up a good content and link up. Does this mean that entering a heavily marketed market (clothing, furniture, home furnishings) is doomed to failure? No. Because a good agency does not position blindly and knows well where to start.

The basis is an audit. An interview with the client, an analysis of the market, including the competition, and then an analysis of previous activities from this angle. It is not uncommon to have to fix something that was broken by previous 'specialists' (including the aforementioned domain boosting with links from Bangladesh). Only after all these actions can a real assessment be made of how high the budget should be in order:

I have decided to go for positioning. What cost should I expect to pay?

Positioning is a long-term investment - not a one-off cost. Very often there is a situation where an overzealous client breaks the contract with an agency after 2 months because they expected fireworks immediately (at the lowest cost of course). Money thrown down the drain.

Another real-life situation: positions are growing like mush, a few phrases in the top 5, another in the top 10, and suddenly the client, delighted with the situation, breaks off cooperation, because why should he pay more? And guess what: the algorithm, used to the earlier pace of onsite and offsite activities, seeing that the site has stopped acquiring new links overnight (or is even losing them) starts doing its thing. The client stagnates and his competition grows, so after a year the guy goes back to doing SEO again, commissions another SEO agency, but you know what? It probably won't go as smoothly as it did before, because every SEO specialist knows that getting back into the top positions with a lazy site is a lot harder than breaking into the tops with momentum (and then maintaining the won position).

Positioning cost and minimum reasonable cost? To put it simply: a minimum reasonable cost is £1500-2000 net. This amount allows for a sustainable campaign divided into content marketing and linkbuilding. Plus sponsored articles. Above all, however, a proper market intelligence and a professional audit are essential. Without this, pricing is a blind exercise. You already understand why "£300 gross. Results after the first month" should be thrown in the bin?