If you pay for an SEO service, fees are normally £250-1000 a month for small to mid-sized businesses.  Hourly SEO rates for freelancers and agency range between £35 and  £120 per hour

The value of the SEO is highly dependent on two things – the ROI and whether any shortcuts have been taken to increase traffic, which could see your site punished at a later date. Google collects a scary amount of data and without a doubt at some point will know if it is being gamed!  Note – SEO  Hampshire is a white hat SEO agency, great infrastructure, fast web speeds, relevant and engaging content is the way to grow online!

Some SEO services (like ours) are good value since we implement technical fixes, but lots simply aren’t as they rely on off-site SEO, PPC or black hat SEO techniques.

What Is Off-site SEO?

Off-site SEO, by definition is the process of building links back to your site.   Ahrefs created a DR (Domain Rating System) points system.  You can check your backlinks and DR Rating for free here www.ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker

Black Hat SEO Tactics To Avoid

The following SEO tactics are considered black hat tactics and your domain will be penalised when found out.

• Content Automation
• Doorway pages
• Hidden Text or Links
• Keyword Stuffing
• Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
• Sneaky Redirects
• Cloaking
• Link Schemes
• Guest Posting Networks
• Link Manipulation (including buying links)
• Article Spinning
• Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
• Rich Snippet Markup Spam
• Automated Queries to Google
• Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
• Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware

If you do SEO in-house – some or all of it – you can significantly reduce the cost of SEO, and it should be the responsibility of your SEO contractor to provide you with the tools and a guide for performing your own on-page SEO for new content creation.

For a small business targeting 5 averagely competitive keywords, the cost of doing SEO is between £100-2500 a year (details below). For subsequent years, if focusing on technical and analytical SEO alone, the cost of doing SEO should drop to between £100-1200 a year, as SEO costs are very much front-loaded with the technical architecture improvements.