Written by sifat islam

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.

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.

How Much Does SEO Cost in Singapore?

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.

Every SEO agency may have its own way of formulating the price, based on their strategies, experience, and project requirements. Usually, you will get a price that fluctuates between $500 to $2,000 per month.

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.

What Affects SEO Pricing in Singapore?

Here are some factors that will determine the SEO pricing in Singapore.

New Domains

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.

Number of Keywords

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.

Keyword Themes

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’.

Competitiveness of Industry

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.

Type Of Business

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

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. Else, the SEO fees will include implementing the technical SEO on your websites.

Complexity of SEO Campaign

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.

• Google Penalty – Building and ranking a brand new website can be relatively easier than fixing one that is bugged with issues or penalised by Google. Recovering from Google penalties require a comprehensive audit and actions taken on every area of SEO. It’s a time-consuming process, and results may not be visible immediately.
• Thin Content – Some websites may only have a handful of pages, with just a couple paragraphs over them. These websites are unlikely to rank well on Google because they are said to have thin content. Often, these thin content need to be beefed up to provide value to users and search engine.
• Non-Targeted Content – Contents that are created without prior keyword research and considering the user intent is unlikely to gain visibility on Google. You will need to have the content reworked and optimised for specific keywords.
• Unorganised Website Structure – A website that is just all over that place is messy not only for humans but also for search engines. The SEO package will need to include remedial works such as keyword mapping or reconstructing the website from scratch.

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.

Guarantees

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 prepare 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.