Local SEO costs approximately £100 per optimised page for a location plus keyword
Example:
30 locations focusing on one keyword Group
- Write 30 pages for £1,240.
- Build 30 pages with images & optimise £1,084
- 10 backlinks £900
Perhaps you agree that local SEO is suitable for your business. Now you want to know the cost.
Four elements represent the cost to the client of successfully optimising a website for a first-page position for a keyword plus location.
Below, include optimising the pages for a group of keywords. For example, a group of keywords could include divorce solicitor, how much a divorce solicitor is, how long a divorce takes, and how to engage a divorce solicitor.
Copywriting
Although several keywords can be grouped, new pages will always be needed. Local SEO is not as simple as adding Luton to the end of every page title or adding near me to the end of a meta tag. SEO content writing.
The first place to start is with hub pages, which should include the entirety of the location. This means perhaps London or the county.
We will take Surrey as an example
There are 127 towns and cities in Surrey. However, 60 has such a small population that there is unlikely to be much business.
Also, you need to ask yourself how far or for how long your clients will drive to come and see you or 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, 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 be original, 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 more straightforward, quicker, and significantly 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, adding Ulster images to internal linking, and creating PDF links to brochures. The list is long.
Once that is completed, we ensure that we can reach the hub page from the website’s home page.
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 most critical pages are our product/service pages or, to put it another way, the pages representing our core keyword.
Cost: Build 30 pages with images and Optimise: £1,084.00.
Backlinks
All SEO relies on two things. On-page SEO improves the website’s content and code, and off-page SEO reflects how the Internet as a whole sees and reacts to this content.
Backlinks include everything from links on the website to links on social media and links from other websites. They represent a measure of trust, which 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 that Google recognises and trusts and hence gives a numerical value, 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 Google recognises as legitimate, the higher the score of a page and, hence, the higher the ranking.
This is a very simplistic way of understanding how Google used to refer to its page rank, but it explains why backlinks are relevant.
While not every local SEO page needs a backlink, every hub page and website home page needs one 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 reason 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 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
Once most of our clients complete the first three steps, they will rank on the first page of Google.
However, more work will be needed for more densely populated locations and more competitive keywords. What works depends on where we rank in Google.
If we are not ranked number 1, 2, or 3, more work must 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 remove all the traffic that is generated locally from this keyword from the competition.
There is a good chance we’ll need additional content.
At some point, we will 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 which pages are targeted at which keyword group.
Cost: Ongoing SEO £900 pcm. Meet the specialist.