How Much Does SEO Cost? My Take on the Finances Behind Performing High Quality SEO Audits on Your Website
The question of how much does SEO cost for my website is a very interesting one, in that Google’s guidelines will actually tell you that it is generally against policy to purchase links etc. With this in mind, there are some legitimate ways that you can use money to increase your SEO visibility, for instance by hiring experts for SEO consulting, and by hiring SEO experts for things like internal link building, on site optimization, blog post SEO through tools like SEO yoast, helping to train you with keyword research, and by performing a comprehensive on-site audit which covers everything from keyword research, to the length that your blog post to be, to density optimization, and a host of other ranking factors that are fairly easily implemented on your website if you know what you’re doing. In this blog post, I’ll tell you a little bit about my own personal journey with SEO, how long I’ve been doing this for, the money that I have generated online with prior blogs, and what I’ve learned about SEO so far, as well as how much money I’ve spent on it through trial and error campaigns, content, hiring experts for consulting, etc. For more information, be sure to comment down below or to subscribe to our blog for additional details and information.
Among the different types of SEO campaigns that I’ve tried so far include the following:
Internal link building
Website silo architecture
on page audits
Using the SEO Yoast tools in order to optimize blog posts
XML sitemaps
submitting links into the URL indexer in Google Webmaster tools
Outsourcing link building which I strongly do not recommend doing (I have spent as much as $50,000 on link buildings tests with mixed results, wish I had that money back.)
Outsourcing content generation, which can be a smart strategy if you are able to play your cards right and edit the content properly
Structured product markup for an SEO e-commerce website
Using Web 2.0 domains in order to minimize hosting fees and trying to generate free traffic
Working for a paid advertising and mobile apps start-up company
And just about every single other type of SEO strategy that you can imagine, read on or subscribe to our blog for additional details and information.
How My SEO Journey got Started, One Bored Summer Night When I Was 16 Years Old
So this is actually a pretty cool SEO journey story, but I’ve been doing so much else at the same time (martial arts, finance, college degrees, going for banking licenses, multiple internships, multiple colleges, working a career in Wealth Management, dealing with a pandemic, etc.) that I sometimes forget how far I have come in the world of internet marketing and of how much I’ve learned in the last 9 years of doing primarily SEO but also paid traffic and social media and drop shipping types of marketing. I started out when I was bored out of my mind with my younger brother, who is now an expert level computer programmer (never hurts for an SEO to have a sibling that is a computer programmer, that definitely comes in handy.)
It started out by me making a few dollars here and there own Twitter, I had found this Twitter-based ad website called Tweeting (something like that) which before they got banned, would have advertisers come and offer you $1-$3 to tweet something random for them. I had gotten reasonably proficient at Twitter and had used little tricks like teamfollowback, like Managefliitter, and like some other tools for scaling your Twitter accounts, to the point where I had as many as 8000 followers on a Twitter account in the health niche at one time. I was getting say weekly or so pings for $1 to $1.50 each time, which while only being $6 per month in revenue, was pretty cool to watch as I had just generated by first dollars and cents on the internet, as just a young high schooler at the time.
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I’ll be honest, after probably 100+ hours of hard work scaling that Twitter account, writing tweets etc. I became absolutely obsessed with making money online once I saw that it was working. I began building more Twitter accounts, began writing Ebooks and generating sales with those, and by the time I had graduated from High School, I had an online business that was making around $100 per month online before I even stepped foot in college.
At the time, this was an incredible amount of money because I could basically go drinking and buy snacks from the vending machine with it whenever I wanted, and so I felt I was living like a king at just age 17 with my $100 per month online income. Fast forward to the summer before I went to college however, and I essentially had three months to myself to do whatever I wanted, with my programmer brother sitting by my side and having an abundance of time on his hands as well. We came up with the idea to start a website, which we did through blogger.com in a health based niche. With a week we were getting dozens of views per day, and within a month, we would occasionally have days where we hit as many as 100 pageviews in a day. This led to more and more energy, enthusiasm and aggression towards scaling our website, and by the end of the summer, we had re-branded on a .wordpress.com Web 2.0 domain and had begun to make our first sales online. So in answering how much does SEO cost in full, the final answer is that it costs a lot at the higher states, but that it is borderline free at the lower stages.
Where My SEO Journey Went from Here, and How Much Does SEO Cost at the Higher Levels?
So, from here, we ended up eventually finding WordPress.org, the platform that I am still to this day writing my blog on, and found that if you used a proper host, spent a little money and setup a .com domain and used a proper open source content management system for my website, such as WordPress, then I would be able to scale my affiliate websites exponentially faster, and that I would be able to learn more SEO and have better performance metrics. Fast forward a couple of years, and we went as far as to have an e-commerce website that was generating north of $10,000 per month in gross sales (for a short six month time frame before it crashed for a variety of reasons, namely payment processing issues and poor financial management skills on the part of yours truly) that sold for $25,000, and have built as many as ten websites since then, some of which generated hundreds of dollars per month.
For now, they have all since been shut down, divested or sold out for a variety of reasons, namely the fact that several of our niches did not do well (Beauty products collapsed, a fitness blog went nowhere, a psychology blog did good for a time until it didn’t, and we had 3 different Yugioh websites all at one time that went nowhere.) I’ve even gone as far as to quit doing SEO for as long as 1-2 years at a time, but for some reason I always came back to it. It’s like this craving would build up inside of me the longer I went without publishing a WordPress blog post, and that it wouldn’t be satisfied until I went and did SEO for 2 to 3 hours, I was literally having SEO withdrawals and had started to have dreams about the WordPress dashboard! To this day if I don’t work on my website for as long as say a week or two, I start to get a nagging feeling in the back of my mind like I’m not doing enough work. Replace this with how I feel after a long 8 hour session of SEO and blogging on one of my affiliate websites, where I have an immense sense of pride and accomplishment that I can feel in the core areas of my soul, and you have someone who will likely be an SEO for life, regardless of how much money I do or do not make from it.
What I’ve Learned About SEO So Far, How Much Does SEO Cost for Beginners?
From my 9 years of SEO testing, I can tell you a few things if you want to start an SEO website from scratch. First of all, you need to get a proper domain hosting on either Bluehost, hostinger, go daddy, or name cheap. I personally have had the most luck with Bluehost and hostinger over the years, even though Bluehost is the most expensive hosting provider (although hostinger is pretty darn close in terms of quality.) Once this is setup, especially for a beginner, try to get some basic web design skills down to where your homepage and internal pages look something like the home page of inflationhedging.com.
I don’t say this to brag about my web design, because it is decent but not expert-level, I say it because it is functional and is very effective for an SEO type website and for monetizing it in the future via something like Affiliate links, email subscribers or Advertisements. I also say it because it allows you to structure your categories in a way that you can keep your blog organized, and so that you can input a very effective internal link building scheme within your website that allows SEO juice to flow evenly throughout all of your blog posts, and to let the Google spiders crawl all of the pages on your website and to make sure that they link through them all properly.
From here, install the SEO Yoast tool and follow the steps until all of the lights are either green or orange, and after this, write, WRITE and write some more, then write until you pass out at the computer, and make sure that your content is darn good. We are in a global competition on the internet now, and Google has explicitly stated that they like websites with good and fresh content, and that good content will give a powerful rankings boost over the contrary. Content also allows you to rank for a variety of keywords within the SERPS, which is going to be another huge way that you are going to generate traffic to your affiliate websites. In finalizing the question here of how much does SEO cost? I’ve made the mistake of spending as much as $2,000 per month on outsourced SEO at once point, which really put me in the whole financially and is not something that I would ever recommend.
Final Thoughts on How Much Does SEO Cost, and Why Minimizing Expenses is a Key Factor in This Business
Hope you enjoyed this once again, slightly off-topic blog post about my journey as an SEO and an affiliate marketer. For more information, be sure to comment down below and to subscribe to our blog for additional details and information. I’ll be starting to publish new content daily now that it looks like my Wealth Management job is going to be working from home for the coming months and possibly years, and since this will save me at least an hour per day in commute time, I think I should have some additional time to start cranking out some decent content. Thanks for reading and I’ll see ya on the flip side.
Cheers!
*Inflation Hedging.com
Sources:
https://code.org/
https://www.freecodecamp.org/
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