Example
30 locations focusing on one keyword Group
- Write 30 pages for £1240.
- Build 30 pages with images & optimise £1080
- 10 backlinks £900
So perhaps you agree that local SEO is suitable for your business. Now you want to know the cost.
To successfully optimise a website for a first-page position for keyword plus location, there are four elements that represent the cost to the client.
Below, include optimising the pages for a group of keywords. A group of keywords, for example, could include divorce solicitor, how much a divorce solicitor is, how long a divorce takes, and how to engage a solicitor for a divorce.
Copywriting
although a number of keywords can be grouped together there is always gonna be a need for new pages. Local SEO is not a simple as adding Luton to the end of every title in your page or simply adding near me on the end of a meta tag.
The first place to start is with hub pages. As the entirety of the location. This means perhaps London or the county.
We will take Surrey as an example
There are a hundred and 127 towns and cities in Surrey. However, 50 has such a small population there is unlikely to be very much business. Also, the question you need to ask yourself is how far or for how long your clients will drive to come and see, alternatively for you to see them.
In our experience, people will drive approximately 30 minutes.
To cross the whole of Surrey by car from Farnham to Lingfield takes more than an hour, so depending on where you are based in Surrey. Initially, you would target half the county. One of the advantages of local SEO is that it is very scalable, and in that sense, you can easily add the second half or venture further afield to Sussex and Kent, et cetera.
- For simplicity, we imagine you are targeting 29 locations.
So, the content requirement initially is a hub page for Surrey, followed by 30 additional pages representing each town/city within our half of Surrey.
Every web page needs to be written. However, with geo-targeted SEO, each page has to have a degree of originality, but we do not have to begin from scratch each time. This means that compared to a blog, news article, or perhaps a top-level treatment service or product page, these pages are easier and quicker and, importantly, less expensive to produce.
Cost: 30 pages = £1240
Optimisation
The second cost is to present the pages to Google.
We take the new copy and create the 31 web pages. The first step is to create a WordPress page, namely the URL, content, and relevant images, and then add a Google map.
We then optimise the content for the keyword and that location. This can include everything from H1, H2 and H3 tags to interlinking to metadata to adding Ulster images to internal linking to creating PDF links to brochures. The list is long.
Once that is completed, we ensure that we can reach the hub page from the home page of the website.
We do not want to add all our geo-pages to our menu as we want to ensure that Google understands that although important, the pages that are actually the most important are our product/service pages or, to put it another way, the pages that represent our core keyword.
Cost: Build 30 pages with images and Optimise: £1080.00.
Backlinks
All SEO relies on two things. On-page SEO is improving content and code on the website, and off-page SEO is a reflection of how the Internet as a whole sees this content and reacts to it.
Backlinks include everything from links on the website to links on social media and links from other websites. They represent a measure of trust. That measure of trust is translated into a number.
Google scores every single webpage. This score can be anything from 1 to infinity. So if your webpage is brand-new, it is scored 1 × 1=0. If you had a backlink which Google recognises and trusts and hence gives a numerical value, then your page may have a score of 1×1.04=1.04. This means that this page will rank above all of the lower-scoring pages. The more backlinks that Google recognises as legitimate, the higher the score of a page and, hence, the higher the ranking.
This is a very simplistic way of looking at what Google used to refer to its page rank, but it does do a good job of explaining why backlinks have relevance.
Whilst not every local SEO page needs a backlink, every hub page needs a backlink, and every home page of the website needs a backlink with an appropriate geo-target location, in this case, Surrey.
Cost 10 backlinks to appropriate pages: £900.00
Perhaps you have heard of citation links
One of the reasons why building citation links to your website will never really work is that the link strength, although possibly high on paper, is actually diluted by the number of pages and then further reduced in strength by the paucity of content and the poorness of the anchor text.
It is worthless and doesn’t affect the multiplier of the page.
Ongoing SEO
For a number of keywords plus location, once the first three steps are completed for most of our clients, they will rank on the first page of Google. For more densely populated locations and for more competitive keywords there will need to be more work done. What works depends on where we rank in Google.
If we are not ranked number 1 2 or 3 then more work needs to be done. It’s important to remember that we want to rank for our group of keywords. Again, a group of keywords can include everything from the core keyword to the price of the keyword, reviews of this keyword, this keyword near me, etc., so we have a lot of work to do so that we maximise and take away from the competition all the traffic that is generated locally from this keyword.
The chances are we’ll need additional content. At some stage, we likely want to extend the area or introduce new keyword clusters into the mix. This is one reason why site architecture is so important to get right at the beginning so that Google can see and understand clearly exactly which pages are targeted at which keyword group.
Cost: ongoing SEO £900 pcm