Purchasing a product or service usually begins with an online search. In fact, over 90% of consumer-business interactions begin with a search on Google (primarily) or other search engines.
It is therefore very important for businesses to have a strong online presence and a good ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract customers.
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Effective online Marketing is crucial to the success of a business and the best way for businesses to ensure they get the most out of their Digital Marketing is to work with a digital marketing agency or form a team internally.
Agencies that specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) marketing will understand your business’s marketing goals and implement proven SEO strategies to achieve those goals and help your business grow.
While businesses can do their own digital marketing in-house, it’s more beneficial to work with a digital marketing agency. SEO experts have a better understanding of how to improve your online visibility and brand awareness to improve your SERP rankings and increase traffic to your website.
Professional Digital Marketing Services can bring your business a great return on investment (ROI), but it’s still an expense your business needs to consider. The cost of SEO services depends on many different factors, which can make it difficult for you to know what to expect.
In this guide, we explain the various factors that affect the cost of digital marketing services as well as the average costs of individual services typically included in a digital marketing plan. This will help you know what you can expect to pay for digital marketing services so you can work with an agency and digital marketing plan that fits your budget.
Determination of natural referencing prices
As mentioned above, the cost of digital marketing services and SEO campaigns will vary depending on many factors, including the specific services needed to achieve your marketing goals.
It’s important to understand what factors go into determining the cost of SEO so you can get a better idea of what you can expect to pay and find a digital marketing agency that offers reasonable prices.
What Digital Marketing Agencies Use to Determine SEO Prices and Rates
The specific marketing needs of your business will largely determine the price of SEO services. In order for a digital marketing agency to provide a quote, they must first understand what your business does as well as your marketing goals.
The agency will then use this information to determine the best SEO strategies to achieve your goals, making it easier to provide a more accurate estimate.
Here are the main factors used by digital marketing agencies to determine SEO costs:
- Your income,
- Your competitors,
- The difficulty of the searched keywords,
- Current ranking of your websites,
- Digital marketing goals targeted by your campaign.
Many agencies offer SEO packages with monthly fees, but these fees can change depending on your specific needs.
Providing the agency with this information about your business will allow them to adjust their SEO packages to suit your needs, which will lead to more accurate pricing.
How Digital Marketing Services Are Billed
Digital marketing agencies and freelance SEO experts can charge companies for SEO services in the following ways:
- Monthly instalments,
- Hourly rates,
- Project-Based Services,
- Performance based,
- Custom SEO Pricing.
Most digital marketing agencies charge monthly for their services. The average SEO cost and rate per month is between Ksh 15,000 and Ksh 100,000, but companies can spend up to Ksh 200,000 per month depending on the scope of their services.
Like anything else, you get what you pay for with digital marketing services if you choose the right digital marketing agency.
The monthly cost of an experienced and quality digital marketing service provider will fall within the price range mentioned above. Beware of agencies that claim to offer comprehensive SEO services at low prices.
Just because monthly billing is the most common pricing model for digital marketing services, doesn’t mean that model is necessarily the best fit for your business.
You need to consider the estimated cost per month of the SEO services you need as well as the budget your business can set aside to pay each month.
Also, digital marketing is not something you can pay for a month and stop, it takes continuous effort for digital marketing services to be effective, which makes this service a recurring monthly expense.
Cost and price of Local SEO
If your business is a local business that only provides products and services in your area, you should consider local SEO.
With local SEO services, the agency will focus on improving your visibility and ranking in the SERPs for local searches to attract more leads to your service area.
On average, local SEO is cheaper because the campaign only targets your local area, as opposed to the entire continent. However, exact local SEO pricing is determined by the same factors that determine pricing for any SEO campaign.
Factors That Determine Digital Marketing Costs and Pricing
The factors that determine the digital marketing prices mentioned above depend on the agency you are working with. The following factors related to your business can also affect the cost of digital marketing services:
- Industry: Highly competitive industries will need to spend more on their SEO campaigns to be seen among their competitors. The number of monthly searches within an industry is what is used to determine competitiveness.
- Location: Several factors about your location can affect SEO pricing, including local population, demand for your products and services in your service area, and your level of local competition. You can expect to pay more for SEO that covers more populated and competitive areas.
- SEO campaign and services: Your SEO campaign will include several services such as keyword research, audits, content creation, pay-per-click (PPC) management, web design, and technical SEO. The more of these services included in your SEO package, the higher the cost will be.
- Current visibility: Current online visibility and brand awareness will also affect the cost of SEO, as businesses with higher visibility will require less effort than businesses with less visibility and brand awareness.
Set Your Digital Marketing Budget
Before getting estimates from digital marketing service providers, you must first determine how much budget you want to set aside to pay for monthly services.
This will help you decide which services you want to include in your digital marketing package that allow you to stay within your budget.
However, you also need to make sure that you are getting enough from your digital marketing services to beat your competitors.
Agencies can provide you with an SEO audit that will show you where you stand against your competitors and what you need to do to beat them.
Return on Investment for Digital Marketing Services
While digital marketing services can bring your business a great return on investment, there are no guarantees. SEO services are designed to bring more traffic to your website and create more sales opportunities, it’s up to your business to convert your leads.
However, increasing the number of leads can lead to increased sales.
It is important to remember that SEO services do not produce instant results. It can take up to 6 months before you see results, which makes SEO a long-term investment.
This investment can help you achieve your marketing goals over time and improve your return on investment.
Average Digital Marketing Cost
It is common for small and medium businesses to spend around 10-20% of their revenue on digital marketing.
The monthly cost for online marketing and SEO services as a whole can be as low as Ksh 20,000 per month and as high as Ksh 200,000, with the average monthly cost usually between Ksh 50,000 and Ksh 150,000.
You can also expect to pay between Ksh 35,000 and Ksh 65,000 for a digital marketing agency to perform and provide an SEO audit and recommendations report.
An independent digital marketing services expert or consultant will generally charge by the hour and can have hourly rates between $50 and $230.
The average price for a freelance digital marketer is $68. While working with a freelancer can be appealing because it’s cheaper, paying a freelancer by the hour to do the work can lead to piecemeal strategies and inconsistent results.
By working with a digital marketing agency instead, you’ll get consistent effort and a comprehensive, long-term plan that will help your business grow over time.
Social Media Advertising Cost
Social media advertising can really give your online marketing campaign a boost, but it takes an investment to get the best results from these campaigns.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Tiktok, and Twitter allow businesses to run an ad campaign where they pay per click for their ads.
If you want social media marketing to be part of your overall digital marketing strategy, spending money on advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media is necessary.
Social media algorithms typically only show some of your content to a small portion of your audience organically, forcing companies to pay for advertising to get results.
The average cost of social media marketing is between Ksh 50,000 and Ksh 150,000 per month, but can be as low as Ksh 35,000 or as high as Ksh 200,000.
On Facebook, you can pay per click for your ads, with each click costing between $0.50 and $2.00. You can also choose the Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) option, or cost per thousand views, in which you pay each time your ad reaches 1000 users. Twitter also offers a pay-per-click advertising model that costs an average of $1.35 per click. With advertising on Twitter, you will pay this fee each time someone clicks, replies or retweets your ad.
Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising Cost
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is offered by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo in which companies create advertisements that focus on a targeted keyword or phrase and pay the search engine for each click.
These ads appear at the top of the SERPs above the organic results.
These ads are designed to target a specific keyword or phrase and the cost per click is determined by the popularity of the term.
These ads can give you an edge by pushing your business to the top of the SERPs for relevant keywords.
On average, businesses spend between Ksh 15,000 and Ksh 50,000 per month on PPC advertising, or between 5% and 25% of their monthly advertising budget.
It helps to have a digital marketing agency with PPC experience to manage your campaign to get the most out of the money you spend.
Email Marketing Cost and Pricing
Email marketing may seem like an outdated marketing strategy, but it’s still widely used because it offers great ROI.
With email marketing, you can stay in touch with your customer base and regularly provide them with special offers and other important information about your business.
Email newsletters are a great way for you to maintain the relationship with your audience.
Many digital marketing agencies offer email marketing as part of their digital marketing services. Email marketing can cost between Ksh 5 – Ksh10 per Word or Ksh 100 – 500/email.
Website Design and Maintenance Costs and Prices
Effective digital marketing starts with an optimized and user-friendly website.
Many digital marketing agencies provide web design services and their design professionals’ work with their SEO experts to create websites that are best suited to perform well in the SERPs.
Businesses may work with professionals who only provide web design services at a one-time cost, but they likely won’t incorporate the SEO principles that a digital marketing agency may incorporate. Website builds are a one-time cost and can cost between Ksh 15,000 and Ksh 100,000.
Once a website is launched, it requires ongoing maintenance to maximize its performance in the SERPs.
This includes making changes to improve website functionality, creating new page content, and optimizing existing content to help improve rankings.
Website maintenance and content marketing can cost between Ksh 20,000 and Ksh 200,000 per month, depending on what is needed to improve and maintain rankings.
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