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How to Offer Affordable SEO Services Without Cutting Into Your Profit

Julia McCoy

Tuesday, 8th Oct 2024

As an agency owner for over a decade, I get it – running an agency is no walk in the park. You’re juggling client demands, managing a team, and constantly searching for ways to not only deliver real results but stay profitable.

One of the biggest struggles? Find a way to offer affordable SEO services that produce the best outcomes for your clients.

Well, I’m here to tell you that meeting your clients’ budget doesn’t have to mean cutting into your profit margins. There’s a smarter approach to scaling your agency, one that doesn’t sacrifice quality for affordability. It all starts with understanding exactly what goes into truly effective, and yes, affordable SEO services.

Finding the Sweet Spot: Cost vs. Value

This is what keeps many agency owners up at night. But let’s cut through the noise.

When I say “affordable SEO services” I don’t mean cheap SEO shortcuts that’ll leave your clients with penalties from Google. No way.

I mean services that are reasonably priced and deliver tangible results.

The sweet spot lies in getting the best possible outcomes for your clients within a reasonable budget.

What Influences the Cost of SEO?

First things first, it’s essential to understand why some SEO agencies charge more than others. The cost of SEO services can be influenced by several factors:

Agency size and reputation: Well-established agencies with large teams often come with a premium price tag. Clients are paying for their track records and a solid reputation built over the years.
Project Scope: Launching a local SEO campaign for a small business in a single city is completely different than creating a national SEO strategy for an enterprise company.
Services Offered: Do they offer the full package – from website audits and content optimization to ongoing search engine rankings reports? Or just a one-off project with fixed rates for specific SEO services?
Contract Length: Agencies sometimes offer a discounted monthly rate if the client signs a long-term contract compared to a month-to-month arrangement. They might even agree to a discounted hourly rate.
Location: It’s no secret that agencies in major metropolitan areas like New York City often have higher overhead costs compared to those in smaller cities. Will a local business need to pay more than a national company?

Real Talk: How “Affordable” Are Affordable SEO Services?

Alright, let’s talk numbers. SEO services typically start around $500 a month and can go up to $3,500 or more.

Now, I know seeing those numbers might make some agency owners a bit nervous.

However, if you were to piece together each of these tools separately for each SEO service that you offer, you’d quickly be drowning in monthly subscription fees:

Imagine the bills piling up:

Screaming Frog at $259 per year
Surfer for $219 per month
Semrush at $499.95 a month

You get the picture. Suddenly, offering affordable SEO services starts to feel impossible.

Not to mention, you will likely also have to worry about the cost of content marketing – for which you will likely need more tools like Canva, BuzzSumo, Clearscope, Buffer, and Hotjar.

But that’s where BrandWell comes in. Instead of juggling a dozen expensive platforms, BrandWell gives agencies a single hub for all things SEO, starting at just $249 per month. This way, your costs stay predictable and, most importantly – manageable.

BrandWell also takes care of all your content creation and optimization needs – making it an all-in-one brand growth engine that helps you help your customers without breaking the bank.

How to Offer Affordable SEO Services While Maximizing Profits as an Agency

From my experience running a 100-person writing agency, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to balance trying to offer affordable SEO services and maintaining the standard of quality you have established for your brand.

If your clientele is made up mostly of small businesses and startups, many of them probably have tight marketing budgets and are looking for cost-effective solutions.

But here’s the thing — just because you’re working within a smaller budget doesn’t mean you have to compromise on results, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should sacrifice your own profit margins.

Over the years, I’ve learned that with the right strategies in place, you can deliver real value to small businesses while keeping your agency profitable. It’s all about being smart with your resources, automating where possible, and focusing on high-impact areas that make a difference.

The goal is to build long-term partnerships by showing clients that even on a budget, they can see results — and your agency can still thrive in the process.

Here’s how you can package affordable SEO services that deliver real benefits to your clients while boosting your own profits.

1. Offer Scalable SEO Packages

One way to cater to small budgets without overstretching your resources is by creating tiered, scalable SEO packages. These can feature different service levels, such as:

Basic Package: This could include on-page optimization, keyword research, and basic analytics reporting. Keep this package affordable by focusing on high-impact but low-effort tasks.
Standard Package: Expand the offering with technical SEO audits, link-building strategies, and content optimization.
Premium Package: Offer a more comprehensive service, including advanced keyword strategies, content marketing, and ongoing performance tracking.

By offering packages, you allow clients to select a plan that fits their budget while ensuring your services remain profitable by managing deliverables and time spent.

Tip: Ensure each package is result-driven with clear performance indicators that show value to clients, helping build trust and loyalty over time.

2. Automate Repetitive Tasks

Automation can drastically reduce your time spent on repetitive SEO tasks, allowing you to focus on high-value activities while keeping operational costs low. For example:

Use SEO tools to automate keyword tracking, backlink analysis, and on-page audits.
Automate reporting to deliver insights to clients quickly and efficiently.

By streamlining these tasks, you can offer affordable pricing without compromising quality, while your agency profits from the efficiency.

Tip: you can pay for a subscription like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, or Screaming Frog but you can also use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

3. Focus on Local SEO for Small Businesses

For small businesses, especially those operating locally, local SEO can have a huge impact. The competition is often less fierce compared to national or global markets, making it easier to achieve results.

Optimize for Google My Business listings, ensuring the client’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is consistent across all online platforms.
Implement local keywords that align with the client’s target market and location.
Gather positive customer reviews and build local backlinks to improve their ranking on local searches.

Local SEO is often more affordable to implement but can deliver great returns for small businesses, making it an attractive option for them and a profitable service for your agency.

4. Educate Clients on Long-Term Value

SEO is not a one-time investment but rather a long-term strategy. Small businesses may expect immediate results, but educating them about the long-term benefits of SEO can help set realistic expectations.

Demonstrating transparency about how their budget can be allocated to key areas like content, backlinks, and technical SEO improvements will enhance trust.

Offer detailed reports and explain the improvements, even if they are incremental. By showing clients how their SEO efforts are building over time, they are more likely to stick with your agency, providing you with a recurring revenue stream.

5. Outsource Non-Core Tasks

Consider outsourcing time-consuming or highly specialized tasks, such as content creation or technical audits, to reliable third-party providers. Outsourcing these tasks can free up your team’s resources for more strategic work, allowing you to maintain service quality while keeping your costs low.

When outsourcing (and I learned this the hard way), be sure to choose partners that align with your agency’s standards so that quality is never compromised. Don’t settle for cheap SEO providers who are willing to get paid pennies because chances are, you’ll get what you pay for.

Check out my step-by-step guide on how to hire a content writer.

Outsourcing non-core tasks can allow you to take on more clients without increasing your overheads, leading to greater profitability.

6. Implement a Points-Based Pricing Model

The points-based pricing model allows clients to purchase a set number of points to spend on various SEO tasks each month. For example, a client may buy 100 points, and each SEO task (such as link-building or content optimization) is worth a certain number of points.

This flexible approach allows small business clients to prioritize the tasks they feel are most valuable each month, all while maintaining transparency about the costs and deliverables. It also lets you scale the workload efficiently across multiple clients, increasing profitability.

7. Prioritize Low-Cost, High-Impact Strategies

To maximize your profit margins, focus on low-cost strategies that have a high impact on client results. For small businesses, you can concentrate on:

On-Page SEO: Ensure that your client’s website is optimized for speed, mobile responsiveness, and user experience. This can often be achieved with minimal investment but can have significant SEO benefits.
Local Citations and Directories: Get your clients listed in relevant, free online directories, improving their local SEO presence.
Content Refreshing: Rather than creating brand-new content, help your clients refresh existing content by updating outdated information, adding new keywords, and improving readability. Start by finding blog posts and web pages that need refreshing and rewriting. BrandWell makes this super easy — all you have to do is enter your client’s URL!

These strategies are often less expensive to implement but can deliver strong results for small businesses, making them feel they’re getting great value for their investment.

8. Offer Performance-Based SEO Services

Another effective way to keep SEO affordable for startups is to implement performance-based pricing. Under this model, your agency could charge clients based on achieved results, such as increased website traffic, improved rankings, or conversions.

This method provides reassurance to small business owners that they are only paying for actual improvements. While this can create a higher risk for your agency, it also allows you to charge premium fees for successful results, leading to higher profit margins in the long run.

Find the right agency pricing model for you in this detailed guide.

9. Automate with an All-in-One Content Marketing and SEO Tool

What if I told you that you could combine all the SEO tools you need into one single platform?

BrandWell is a powerful all-in-one brand growth engine that offers keyword research, long-form SEO blog generation, AI assistance for writing short-form marketing copies, and a full suite of SEO and content intelligence tools that can be a game-changer for your agency.

Key Benefits:

Cost Efficiency: By consolidating all your SEO-related tasks into a single platform, you avoid the need to pay for multiple software licenses or subscriptions. This can lead to significant savings, especially for agencies managing several clients.
Streamlined Workflow: Having all your SEO functions on one dashboard eliminates the friction of switching between platforms, which not only saves time but also minimizes the risk of errors due to data silos.
Scalability: An all-in-one tool allows you to scale your SEO services without proportionally increasing overhead costs. As you take on more clients, BrandWell can handle larger workloads without needing additional manpower.

Rather than paying for a long list of tools or hiring different experts to handle individual SEO tasks, automation through BrandWell can help cut down your expenses while boosting your service quality.

Here’s how:

Keyword Research and Strategy: Instead of subscribing to a separate keyword research tool, BrandWell’s integrated platform can help you analyze trends, provide competitive insights, and suggest relevant keywords in real time. This saves money on specialized (and often expensive) keyword tools and reduces the time spent on manual research.

Plus, you can create topic clusters (in just one click!) which is great for building authority and improving your client’s brand positioning in their niche.

Automated Blog Generation: With the RankWell long-form SEO writer, you can create SEO-optimized blogs at scale without needing to hire more or outsource to content writers. Just enter a long-tail keyword and in just a few minutes you’ll get a well-written, SEO-optimized blog post based on content that’s currently ranking for that key phrase — drastically cutting down time and labor costs associated with content writing.

Each long-form blog post that RankWell generates comes with a meta title, meta description, URL slug, introduction hook, table of contents, H2-H4 headers, bullet points, key takeaways, and a conclusion with custom CTA to wrap everything up.

One of the awesome features of RankWell is automatic link building. While it is “writing” your article, RankWell will add internal links to your blog post, pointing anchor texts to relevant content pieces on your website. It will also add external links that connect your blog post to credible sources like Wikipedia or news articles. All of your links on autopilot — now how cool is that? 💫

On-Page SEO: Although RankWell’s output is usually good enough to publish, a meticulous editor (like me!) or SEO specialist would want to add some personal touches to the first draft to make it more appealing to readers and search engines. RankWell’s text editor has everything you need to make each article look perfect: keyword optimization, image optimization, NLP scoring, real-time content audits, plagiarism scanning, AI detection, and an SEO checklist.

Automating these aspects allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks, avoiding the need for expensive specialists.

Bonus: Generative AI Assistance: If your agency is offering other content services beyond SEO, BrandWell can help automate those too. On the same RankWell dashboard, click the Generate tab to access WriteWell — the generative AI suite of BrandWell. For general writing tasks like emails, sales letters, and even ad copy, just type a quick prompt and let the AIMEE chatbot do the work for you.

Here’s an ad copy I asked AIMEE to write for a product launch:

For specialized content formats, WriteWell has 40+ AI agents trained to write platform-specific copy like Instagram stories, Amazon product listings, email sequences, and LinkedIn value posts.

I personally helped train our AI agent for Facebook Story Posts and now it writes almost all of my Facebook content, like this:

Need an ebook for your lead magnet? Watch how our AI Director, Jeff Joyce, created an entire 8,000-word ebook using WriteWell:

And here’s Jeff again creating an email newsletter in just 16 minutes:

By automating SEO and content marketing tasks with BrandWell, you not only streamline operations but also ensure consistent, high-quality deliverables for your small business clients. This approach can lower your operational costs significantly, giving you a competitive edge while boosting your profitability as an agency.

Balancing Affordability and Profitability

Want to offer your clients affordable SEO services while also growing your agency? Let me share with you the story of Joe Crivello-Sorensen, one of our most successful BrandWell customers.

You see, Joe used to run a restoration company for 27 years. Since he was doing all the marketing himself, he figured he could use his experience and help struggling carpet cleaners with their marketing once he sold his business. What started out as a retirement hobby is now a full-fledged agency raking in $350K per month! Here’s how he did it with BrandWell:

Read about Joe’s full story here.

If you’re like Joe, and you want to help small businesses in your industry, you can offer affordable SEO services without cutting corners or reducing your profits. By adopting scalable packages, automating processes, focusing on high-impact strategies, and educating clients on the long-term value of SEO, you can deliver cost-effective solutions that bring real results.

Flexible models like points-based pricing and performance-based SEO services can help you tailor your offerings to fit a wide range of budgets while still ensuring profitability for your agency.

By focusing on efficiency, scalability, and delivering results, your SEO services can become an affordable, results-driven solution that attracts and retains small business clients, all while growing your bottom line.

Written by Julia McCoy

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