It’s always amusing how a typical SEO pitch goes, especially when issues on the cost are raised. When given the numbers, business owners tend to react in shock, either from the seemingly expensive retainer or a ridiculously low price.
Yes, SEO pricing in Singapore goes from end to end. It’s understandable how some business owners will react negatively if they have not achieved positive results in prior SEO campaigns.
Dubious SEO packages, particularly those that are priced well below market rates, often fail to deliver. In such cases, business owners are just wasting their hard-earned money.
However, a properly crafted SEO strategy, with seamless execution, will result in a better positioning on search engines, higher organic traffic and naturally, better conversions. According to a study, the 1st position on Google gets 33% of the search traffic for a particular keyword.
There’s also a growing awareness amongst businesses in Singapore on the importance of SEO. This is in line with a survey that shows organic growth via presence being the top focus of marketers in Asia.
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It sounds cliche, but the answer to the question is ‘it depends’. SEO services pricing in Singapore varies according to the agencies that you talk to.
The cost of SEO services in Singapore can vary significantly depending on the agency’s strategies, experience, and the specific needs of your project. Typically, SEO prices in Singapore range from $500 to $2,000 per month. It's important to choose an agency that provides value for the price, ensuring they have the expertise to meet your business goals.
If you are dealing with SEO consultants, you may get a lower quotation. However, bear in mind that SEO consultants are usually freelancers, which means they are likely to operate in a 1 or 2 person team. This could turn into a bottleneck if the consultants are taking on too many projects simultaneously.
Meanwhile, SEO companies in India are known for their low rates. Usually, you will get SEO fees around $99 to $400 per month. While the fees are attractive, you can’t be sure if they are going to produce the desired results.
Does this mean that you will only get good results with an expensive SEO package?
Not necessarily. But we are suggesting that SEO pricing in Singapore isn’t the sole factor of your decision. Instead, you will need to understand how the agency or consultant comes up with their pricing.
In order to gain better search engine rankings, there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done, and the pricing will suggest if it is covering the necessary tasks.
Here are some factors that will determine the SEO pricing in Singapore.
If you have just bought a new domain for your business, it will not gain as much trust on Google compared to established ones. Therefore, more works will need to be done to increase its trust and authoritativeness on the search engine.
If you are targeting 5 keywords, expect different pricing than an SEO package that covers 50 keywords. The amount of work done increases when more keywords are included.
Some keywords are easier to work on and may result in cheaper pricing. However, if you are in niches like medical and finance, the work involved is more complicated as Google has a stricter algorithm for such keywords.
While some SEO firms charge by keywords, others price their packages by keyword themes. A theme usually contains groups of similar keywords such as ‘lasik clinic Singapore, best lasik clinic Singapore and ‘lasik clinic in Singapore’.
It’s fairly easy to rank on Google if you are up against only a couple of competitors in Singapore. The SEO price will increase if you are in a very competitive industry. For example, foods and fashions are a competitive industry, and it will take more effort to rank.
Foods-related keywords are generally monopolised by publishers or marketplace sites. You are most likely to get sites like Tripadvisor and blogs instead of the restaurant’s website.
Keywords in some industries may also be harder to rank as there are too many established competitors. In such cases, more works need to be done and hence, a higher SEO fee.
The keyword ‘Dental Keyword’ is a moderately competitive, as shown by its keyword difficulty. Therefore, there’s a need to increase the credibility of the website, which may involve getting more backlinks. On-page SEO like meta title/description optimisation is also a must to have any chance of ranking on the first page.
SEO strategies differ depending on the type of business you are operating. The strategy for a local business in Singapore, for example, revolves on local SEO Singapore. It’s about getting traffic from location-based searches. This is very different from enterprise SEO, which takes a broader approach to implementation.
In recent years, many businesses are operating on e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce. SEO for e-commerce is fairly unique as there’s a greater focus on optimising for the product pages.
These differences ultimately affect how SEO packages are priced.
Technical SEO involves optimisations that focus on the structure of the website itself, such as the robots.txt file, URL structure and XML sitemap.
If you have an existing web developer who could take care of these details upon recommendations, you may save on the cost of SEO services in Singapore. Else, the SEO fees will include implementing the technical SEO on your websites.
A website that’s bugged with existing issues will be harder to rank as there are more remedial works that need to be done. Here are the common ones.
When a website faces one or more of the mentioned issues, the SEO campaign gets more complicated. Depending on the issues, you may get very different fees from the agency.
SEO is a very dynamic process and subjected to the changes in search engine algorithms. Therefore, it’s hard to provide guarantees of any sort. However, if you insist that the agency guarantee results, you will find that the fee is more expensive.
Be prepared to pay more if you are insisting on a guarantee of hitting page one on competitive and popular keywords. With that said, you will want to be cautious if an SEO agency offers guarantees that sound too good to be true.
Some agencies may promise you on getting to the first page of Google in less than a month. Or the outrageous claim of keeping all of the keywords on the top. Rather than being tempted by such promises, you ought to enquire if ranking on such keywords will drive any real traffic or if the methods involved are legit.
If the agency uses Black Hat SEO to game Google’s algorithm, it’s only a matter of time before it was detected and penalised. Recovering from the Google penalty is often harder than ranking a new site with legit methods.
Avoid falling for promises like getting your site on the first page of Google overnight. It’s impossible unless you are ranking for keywords that are of no value.
Linkbuilding, which is basically getting backlinks from relevant and authoritative sites, remains an important aspect of off-page SEO. If your site is sorely lacking in backlinks, the SEO agency will need to focus more on link building.
Outreach effort, which involves guest-posting, local citation and content creation requires a certain amount of budget.
If your site is already optimised with SEO practices that are still relevant, the fee will exclude certain optimisations. However, if you have implemented Black-Hat SEO techniques that are hurting your traffic, a higher fee may be incurred to reverse the changes.
Some clients will require the SEO agency to meet certain KPIs, such as click-through rate, page views and publishing schedule. The expectation for the agency to meet stringent KPIs often comes with a higher monthly fee.
In Singapore, it’s common for SEO agencies to charge a fixed monthly fee, which varies according to the requirements, difficulty and the hours of work done.
Here is a rough estimation of the SEO pricing in Singapore.
Most businesses start with mid-level or top-level if they are in a competitive industry. Of course, if a business needs aggressive SEO implementation in a very competitive niche, they will need to pay for enterprise-level packages.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution as far as SEO packages are concerned. Here’s how to choose one for your business.
Most local businesses start with mid-level SEO, which includes more optimisation strategies to gain visibility in a competitive industry. Mid-level SEO costs around $700- $1500/ month, although it may not solve all of your SEO problems.
The SEO agency may carry out strategies like content optimisation, where existing pages are checked that they are structured with headings(H1, H2) and the meta title/descriptions are optimised for the targeted keywords. Contents that are low quality are rewritten with keywords and readability in mind.
Optimisations like internal linking or linking to credible sources are also carried out in mid-level SEO. The links help Google to better understand the structure of your website and its informational value.
If you are in a very competitive industry, you will want to consider signing up for a top-level SEO package. By paying around $1500 - $3000 per month, you will have a more comprehensive implementation of SEO strategies.
Top-level SEO packages usually include technical fixes, monthly content publishing and a continuous link-building effort.
Competing at a regional or global scale requires enterprise-level SEO. Usually, the price for enterprise SEO packages goes beyond $3,000 a month. The package includes fully customised SEO strategies that are aligned with the organisation’s campaign and goal.
While monthly payment seems to be the preferred model by businesses in Singapore, there are some that opted for other forms of payment.
There are SEO agencies that collect payment only when the website has ranked for the respective keywords.
Another unique arrangement is where the client pays only when organic traffic leads to sales. In this model, the SEO agency will receive a certain percentage from the sales revenue.
Most SEO agencies in Singapore charge between $100 to $175 per hour. It’s tempting to go for an agency that offers the lowest rate, but you will need to be aware of what you are paying for.
For example, an SEO agency that offers a package between $300 -$600 means the team is only working on your website for 2-4 hours per month.
4 hours is a relatively short period to get any real SEO work done. You could be fine with it if you are not in a competitive industry or your site is already ranking for most of the keywords.
However, paying for 4 hours work a month isn’t going to achieve much, if you are hoping to outrank your competitors further.
Besides the lack of results, agencies that are charging heavily-discounted prices may also cut corners on their work. They could be only tweaking on the meta titles and descriptions or building low-quality backlinks from private blog networks (PBNs).
If you are not familiar with SEO, you could be tricked into believing that you’ve got a bargain, until your site loses traffic due to the shoddy works done.
SEO isn’t meant to be cheap.
In fact, you will want to expect SEO fees to be kind of expensive. That’s because executing SEO strategies that bear results involves many processes. The agency will need to work at on-page optimisation, technical SEO, and manual outreach for link building and PR.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.
SEO pricing in Singapore aren’t cheap. At least, not from agencies that are proven to deliver results.
Once a website is fairly established on Google, it will start to drive in organic traffic on ranked keywords. You will have a consistent and often growing visitors without spending heavily on advertisements.
You will get to maximise your earnings as the cost of lead acquisition becomes very low in the long term.
With that said, SEO may not be the right strategy if you are a startup or small business looking for instant leads. You will want to make SEO a long term strategy to establish your online presence and produce a steady stream of leads for your business.
It all depends on the various factors that we have mentioned. You will need to ask questions like how competitive in your industry, and are there competitors that are occupying the top spots on Google?
You will need to spend more if you are in a niche where it’s difficult to rank. The same applies if there are substantial works to be done on an existing site.
The amount that you ought to spend also depends on how aggressive you want the SEO campaign to be. A more frequent schedule of content optimisation and link outreach will result in higher spending.
Compare the price that you are paying for the results that you want to achieve. If the conversions could result in high revenue, then you will have a good reason to spend more to dominate the search engine.
Yes. Although it may take some time to rank, the result of a well-executed SEO campaign will lead to positive ROI in the long term.
Usually, it will take 3-6 months before you will see any changes in ranking. In extremely competitive industries, it may take up to 12 months before getting results.
If you are a small business looking to gain better visibility on Google, we'll suggest starting with a mid-level SEO package, that ranges between $700 - $1,500 a month.
A mid-level package addresses more problems and improvements compared with a basic package. It takes into account more variables, including on-page and off-page optimisations like :
No, it's not. If you have a realistic expectation, you will start enjoying free traffic for your business when the efforts bear results.
Besides that, getting found on Google has a positive impact on brand reputation.
It could take 6 months or more before you start seeing positive results with SEO. Therefore, it's important to ensure that the right strategies have been carried out and be patient when results are not showing yet.
Before you spend on SEO again, understand what's the strategy taken by the SEO firm.
I hope this article has helped you get a better understanding of SEO pricing in Singapore and what you can expect from each tier.
Always keep in mind that SEO is a long term game plan - there are no short-cuts. Before engaging a SEO company, here are some useful SEO questions to ask.
If you receive a SEO quotation that is unbelievably affordable, you may want to double check if the agency is engaging in black hat SEO. It is a SEO technique that may cause you to run the risk of hefty penalties, de-indexed websites, and a massive loss in rankings that can cost thousands and take years to recover from.
Need a second opinion? Feel free to reach out to Heroes of Digital, a best SEO Singaopore agency with over 600 clients.
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