I have to warn you first, real SEO services done by specialists is not cheap. Successful, full scale SEO most likely won’t be in the range of several hundred dollars. Think of it this way. If someone can bring you high rankings for keywords with reasonable amount of searches at a couple of hundred dollars, why don’t he do it on his own site?

I can assure you, web sites can make money as long as you can attract traffic. If 500 bucks or 3 days can push a site to the top, SEOs would rather keep creating and optimizing sites for themselves instead of for clients.

The fact is, it costs more time therefore more money, which makes serving clients worth the work.

Now talk about the actual cost. It greatly depends on your target market. If you’re just targeting at a not-too-competitive market, then your costs are usually in the range of $1,500-2,000.

If you’re targeting something like “sex” then it would take much more work to achieve top rankings and traffic, and thus the prices would also be higher. These highly competitive markets usually start at $1,000 monthly.

Any semi-competitive market that you’d be targeting will have costs starting from $2,000.

The above costs are for sites with 20-30 pages. Naturally, the bigger your site is, the more pages you want to optimize, the higher the cost will be.

Is it worth it? You might be asking now. To answer this question, you have to ask yourself another question: can your site make sales once visitors come? If you have good products or services, proven sales copy, excellent customer service, competitive price… everything that makes visitors click the buy button, then SEO is definitely worth it. It provides you the most wanted element, visitors.

Think of the sales you will make. Sometimes I feel it strange to be honest. Few people question the importance of advertising and marketing in offline world. Marketing staffs are the most highly paid group in any company. Without marketing, there’s no business.

Yet people hesitate to invest in marketing in the cyberworld. In essence, SEO is the same as offline advertising – reach your target audience. It doesn’t come cheap. Think of the price of TV commercial, newspaper ads…

There is a difference however: your TV commercial will not continue when you stop paying, while your search engine listings have a much better chance to stay there for quite a long time once you get there.