Today, the concept of "search engine promotion" is already familiar to many, and its main tactics can be studied independently. Many customers wonder what exactly they pay agencies for, and why the cost of services varies greatly. First of all, to justify the prices, you can make an approximate calculation: how many hours of work of a good SEO specialist can be "bought" for this or that amount, and how much time is objectively required for this or that work. For example, a full site audit requires 15 hours, and this is only the initial stage. On average, over 6 months of work on a project, a thousand working hours of the entire SEO agency staff are spent, i.e. about 170 hours per month.
What does this time go on? First of all, the resource is added to Yandex. Directory, Google Addresses, linked to the promotion region, robots and sitemap are checked, etc. Without these little things, it is impossible to carry out other operations. And only on them about 4 hours are spent.
Setting up analytics systems takes 10 hours. Specialists set up Yandex. Metrica and Google Analytics counters, click maps, webvisor, and visitor counters.
Compiling a semantic core may take up to 25 hours. Depending on the specifics of the business, it may include from a couple of hundred to tens of thousands of queries. The more — the longer the parsing and cleaning takes. The process can last several months, during which SEO specialists study hundreds of search results pages.
A full site audit takes 15 hours. The analyst evaluates the site by the following criteria
- code quality,
- link mass,
- content uniqueness,
- authority and reputation for search engines,
- structure,
- usability.
Analysis of the sites of the main competitors, which occupy high positions in the search results, takes 12 hours. Based on the data obtained, a content strategy is developed. It is determined:
- what texts are required for the site,
- what else is needed (photos, videos, tables, diagrams, reviews),
- how often it is necessary to update and change the content.
Based on this, a technical assignment is developed for programmers and copywriters. This work requires about 30 hours from a team of an SEO specialist, copywriter, and designer. Also, together with the customer, it is necessary to resolve issues related to the structure of the site, new pages and functionality, content placement, writing texts. This is another 10 hours. First of all, copywriters write optimization texts for the promoted pages or adjust the already posted ones for key queries. After that, the site is filled with articles, news, blog entries, etc., which are constantly required.
Another important stage is registration in catalogs, which takes 10 hours of work from a link manager. The site is registered in white catalogs, Yandex. Catalog, DMOZ. What does this give:
- trust of search engines,
- targeted traffic, i.e. visitors who came via links in the subject catalog.
Links are also purchased, regular monitoring is carried out, the semantic core is reviewed every three months, and much more, reports are prepared, etc.