Complete Guide to SEO Pricing in Singapore [Updated]

If you’ve been searching for affordable SEO package pricing and cost in Singapore and find this task difficult, fret not, you’re not alone. In the Google search engine, more than 100 people are searching for this keyword monthly. That’s quite a substantial amount of monthly search volume.

SEO services in Singapore have always been in demand especially in the B2B industries. About 70% of marketers perceive SEO as a more effective marketing campaign compared to other channels such as pay-per-click ads and more. If you’re not looking to invest in SEO as one of your business marketing goals, you’ll be risking potential traffic and sales to your competitors.

How much does SEO cost in Singapore?

Great. So you are keen to look for good SEO services in Singapore. But how much will it cost you?

The short answer is, it depends.

Many SEO agencies provide basic SEO services or even incomplete services at an exorbitant price. Usually, this comes in the form of full upfront payment without any guarantee of results, potential customers who have little or no SEO knowledge may be persuaded by this unfair arrangement. Ultimately, many customers have suffered financial loss without seeing any SEO results for their businesses. Or worst, some companies may have lost trust and confidence in the effectiveness of SEO and may not engage a digital marketing agency anymore.

To understand how SEO pricing works, we’ll need to know the various package structures that an SEO company provides.

SEO Pricing Models

If you’ve been looking for local SEO services in Singapore, you may be already swarmed by many types of SEO packages in Singapore. As customers have different business and marketing goals, it can be quite confusing and difficult to find the most suitable SEO pricing in Singapore.

Here are few common packages structures to know.

1. Fixed pricing

In the Fixed pricing model, an SEO agency will bill clients a monthly amount for a campaign. For example, a customer may be looking for SEO solutions for his or her website that has just been developed. In this case, the SEO company will charge a monthly fee, such as $500 per month for content published, until the contract ends.

This pricing model is quite popular with new SEO agencies as it is easy to present and understand for customers who are new to SEO. It’s also easier to justify to a prospect and suitable if he has a set budget.

2. Project-based pricing

This pricing model is similar to fixed pricing, but it’s focused on short-term campaigns with not too many deliverables to achieve. Project-based pricing is suitable for clients who are looking for a specific scope for the SEO campaign.

For example, a client may be willing to spend $3500 for a technical SEO audit, $300 per page for web UI design, and more.

If an SEO agency can work fast and produce excellent performance, this is suitable for you.

3. Value-based pricing

Value-based pricing is like its exact words; an SEO project that is based on the value perceived by clients. This can mean clients are willing to pay for SEO service based on the value an agency can provide.

For example, if an SEO agency can persuade a client that by engaging in its services, he or she is guaranteed to benefit from a 250% increase in business sales generation. In this way, the total contract price is determined by the agency depending on the scope of work.

However, the idea of “value” can be quite vague and subjective which usually brings lots of miscommunication and unrealistic expectations.

4. Retainer pricing

In retainer pricing model, a client agrees to a pre-paid fee for a set of deliverables or time. This is favorable among clients who are not looking for variable costs.

For example, a client may be looking to be charged $6000 monthly for several hours of SEO efforts.

As this pricing model requires a client to pay upfront, it’s important to lay down the SEO campaign’s work properly and ensure all items are discussed and approval mutually.

5. Hourly pricing

Using hours as an industry standard, an SEO company will utilize an hourly rate and bill clients according to the total number of hours needed for the SEO campaign.

For example, if an agency charges $100 per hour and the total hours needed for the SEO campaign to show optimum results, the total cost may be mutually confirmed and split into 6 or 12-month installments.

This is useful for customers who are looking for a controllable budget but with some flexibility. If a customer wishes to accelerate the SEO effort and work for a certain number of hours, he or she can request to the agency, and they will put in more hours for a period.

How much is SEO per month in 2021 and beyond?

So, you have understood the different SEO pricing structures in Singapore. Which one should you choose?

Fortunately, in the local market, the majority of the SEO companies provide a fixed pricing model where an SEO agency charges customers a monthly fee for a campaign. Nice and easy.

Usually, the basic SEO packages range from $850 to $1300 per month. This includes a set amount of keywords an SEO company will help you to rank for in search engines. For this pricing, the number of keywords can be from 15 to 50 and the number of SEO content written and published per month for you can be from 1 to 2 articles. This arrangement is usually suitable for a company’s website that has just been developed or has no SEO work being done at all. These businesses are usually B2B with not a lot of products or services and have a relatively small website.

For a website that is of Ecommerce or large enterprises’ size, there are bound to have many pages and keywords to optimize for search engines. The cost of SEO will usually be much higher ranging from $2000 to $3500 monthly. Depending on the SEO agency’s pricing strategy, the package may be custom-tailored with only a certain area of SEO is focused on.

Ultimately, you’ll need to be mentally prepared for the rising cost of hiring local SEO companies in Singapore if you have a large website with lots of pages and keywords ranking to improve. If you happened to be in this situation, it’s also better to have a good SEO strategy and focus on a few buckets of main keywords and pages that make the most sense to your business’ profits and goals.

SEO campaign duration

In the past decade, SEO was always a relatively easy task to do. The previous SEO strategies include performing keyword research and stuffing (inserting LOTS of similar keywords into your website) and get black-hat backlinks (more on that later). Within a week or two, you should be able to see your pages start to rise in Google search results pages and page 1.

Right now, you’ll be bound for Google’s penalization if you do that. Usually, it takes 3 to 6 months for Google to start indexing your pages and 12 months to start rising in Google search results. This is because there are billions of websites been created and updated daily, and Google’s algorithm is working hard to analyze these pages.

Therefore, for a typical package, the SEO campaign duration will range from 6 months to 12 months. This is the best and optimum duration for you to see results in the search engines. Customers will need to enter a contract or agreement with the SEO agency so that the work done on your websites is secured and protected from intellectual property claims.

Where does the cost of SEO go to?

You may be wondering: “gosh, why does it cost so much to hire SEO services?”

Well, if you’re running an SEO company in Singapore, you probably understand why. There are many costs to cover during your client’s entire SEO campaign. To picture this better, we’ll need to understand how SEO works.

In a proper and comprehensive SEO work process, some components needed to be done correctly.

1. Cost of SEO professional tools

At the start of your SEO campaign onboarding, an SEO company will perform data analysis and technical audit on your website. This step is to find out underlying technical issues your website may be facing, historical data, past negative SEO attacks (if any), and more. This will take up to 1 week to fully understand your website’s health and is also the first step to design a proper SEO blueprint for you. Professional SEO tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs are necessary to perform these audits and they can cost up to $1000 per month.

Some SEO professional tools are also needed to track keywords ranking which can help in page optimization. Google search results are usually fluctuating due to many different factors the websites have. With the difference in keywords rankings (mainly in Position 1 to 10 on the first page), the traffic shares will be affected greatly.

2. Cost of hiring talents

Moving on, many phases require lots of time, effort, and experience: keyword research, competitive analysis, and more. On top of the SEO tools mentioned, the time spent by SEO professionals in an agency is being paid as salary. As this work requires prior SEO knowledge, the staff salary can start from $2500 per month for an entry-level SEO junior.

For larger projects, the entry-level SEO staff would likely not be able to cut it for the work and this is where a Project manager and Senior SEO experts are needed. This means higher hiring costs for the company to stay in the market.

Occasionally, there may be cases where clients’ websites need a revamp or migrated to a different content management system. The cost of website design will also come into play.

3. Cost of content creation

Content strategy is an important aspect of a good SEO blueprint. To produce unique and high-quality content, an SEO company may outsource this process to the United States or Canada where the cost of hiring freelance writers can be high. These overseas companies charge the local agencies at their currency rate which will affect the local SEO’s prices too.

Sometimes, the client’s niche may be too technical such as medical, law, finance, engineering, and more. If SEO agencies don’t have experienced writers in these fields, it is essential to engage freelance or external content agencies who can write better and trusted related posts for your clients.

4. Cost of office space rentals

To house a diverse SEO team, one needs to have an office with the proper IT setups in Singapore.

As property prices are always rising through the years, it has become one of the highest fixed costs for SEO agencies to support. This trickles to the total SEO cost that agencies need to include in an SEO package for clients.

Black hat or White hat?

Have you heard of black hat or white hat SEO?

First, we need to understand how link building works.

To start ranking for keywords and receive organic traffic, your website will likely need a good amount of high domain authority backlinks. Backlinks are simply links from external websites that act as a vote of confidence. The more votes you have from different websites, Google will trust your website more to show on page 1.

For a black hat SEO, the link-building process usually requires a publishing fee that will be paid to website owners for them to place a link on their website. Some people even have access to Private Blog Networks (PBNs) which are expired low-quality domains that are purchased over and revamped. As these websites belong to the same owner, it is fairly easy to sell link placements. These generally don’t follow Google’s guidelines and you may risk having your website being penalized.

In white hat SEO, backlinks are secured through legitimate and unique content being published on your website. For example, you may have conducted thorough research with data-driven studies on a topic that most people are talking about on the internet. With this new piece of unique content, many websites are looking to have your content as a trusted reference to their blogs, and that’s where link building occurs naturally.

Do SEO work and worth the money?

So, can SEO help your business to grow?

The answer is yes.

Nowadays, more people turn to search engines such as Google to research products that they are looking to buy. With the buying intent in place, being shown on Google’s first page will greatly improve the chances of potential customers visiting your website and make a purchase.

In digital marketing advertising such as PPC and Social media ads, each advertisement click is charged at a price. If more people are entering your website through the ads, the cost will increase significantly. This affects your business’s return on investments (ROI) and profit margins.

However, in SEO, if your website has gone through proper optimization, your page rankings will help in your search visibility and online presence. There is no cost needed for the potential customers to enter your website and make a purchase. In the long run, your organic traffic will improve your ROI greatly.

Who should I hire for SEO: Agency, Freelancer, Myself? (Can I do SEO on my own?)

At one point in time, you may ask yourself: “Can I do SEO on my own?“

Well, it may not be as easy as it seems to be.

There are many processes needed to put in place properly to start seeing results in your SEO’s efforts. If one is not experienced, he or she may risk violating Google’s guidelines which can cause your website to be penalized. Once that happens, it is extremely difficult to climb the keyword rankings back to your usual spot.

To avoid this problem, you can either hire a professional SEO agency or freelancer.

For a freelancer, it is quite difficult to manage your campaign properly. Oftentimes, freelancers are extremely busy as they are handling many projects simultaneously without manpower support. If your project is not prioritized, you would be neglected. You may also risk being engaged in a work arrangement that is not transparent.

For SEO agencies, it is usually safer as companies will need to be registered under Singapore’s law to conduct businesses. An SEO company in Singapore would also have larger manpower resources and account managers are tasked to communicate with you should there be any questions you have. This “exclusive” form of working relationship builds trust and confidence for customers. You can also request their past SEO track records if you’re feeling suspicious or unsure.

Final Thoughts

Before hiring SEO services, it is important to understand the pricing structures so that you can make better decisions. Many inexperienced business owners have wasteful spending on SEO services that don’t bring them results. Therefore, you should spend some time talking to a few digital marketing agencies in Singapore and obtain proper SEO quotes before deciding on hiring a suitable partner.

If you’re looking for a trusted digital marketing agency, be sure to check out our SEO services to email us, and one of our experts will contact you shortly.