SEO Cost in India for Small Business, E-Commerce and Travel Websites
By: Joseph de Souza
Cost of Good Quality SEO in India
The cost of quality SEO for a website in india will vary depending on the type of website, the amount of work done and the expertise of the person doing it.
It is a fact that a person with experience and with proven results obtained earlier will get better results. How to select such an SEO?
Well I have explained in this answer and the principles apply to any other location as well. I have explained the types of SEO companies to avoid, how to shortlist companies, what information will a good company ask and even how to find out whether the SEO work is yielding results. I have outlined all this and more in how to choose the best seo company in india including all the basic points that you have to consider when selecting an SEO for your business website.
I will now proceed to briefly explain what work is required on the website (On-Page ) and how much it will cost at a minimum when done by an SEO who has enough knowledge and skill to get the desired results.
On-Page SEO Costs - The Breakup
The On-page SEO work will consist of taking care of the technical aspects of the site, keyword research, content writing, SEO Copy editing and entering the title tags, description meta tag, ALT tags (for images) as well as canonical tags. In case you do not have the service pages, product pages or tour pages (in case of a tour company) already present on your website, niche research is necessary.
Niche research involves finding the best topics to target for the sector after asking the client what services are being offered (or product sold) and then the topics are shortlisted. For a tour operator, it will be shortlisting the main tours conducted which will attract the maximum customers. An example of how niche research is done is demonstrated in the SEO for Plumbers in the section website structure for your plumbing business.
After this detailed keyword research is done. Then the keywords are mapped to the relevant web pages. The content brief is written along with a list of keywords as well as questions to target for a particular page to a good content writer or a person from your staff who can write well and is well versed with the topic.
Besides this the technical errors in the website will have to be rectified either by your developer or by the SEO at additional cost. Additional plugins may also have to be installed example Yoast SEO plugin for a WordPress website.
Work Done by the SEO Consultant or Company
The SEO freelancer or company that you have selecting will be in overall charge of the SEO implementation for your website. A case study of SEO work done for an ecommerce website in Denmark is given here How a Denmark Based E-Commerce Company Increased Traffic by more than 140%.
First of all a SEO Audit is conducted. Then a report will be given mentioning the deficiencies that will have to be corrected by your developer or the SEO consultant/company may do it for you at extra cost. In case your website does not have the requisite pages your niche will be researched to find the the best topics to target for the sector. Detailed keyord research will be done as well as the long tail keywords as well as related keywords. A content brief will be given to you so you can proceed to write the content or hire a good content writer.
After your content is ready as per the brief given, the SEO consultant will proceed with the SEO Copy Editing. Here the text will be reviewed, edited, checked for proper keyword usage and text will be made attractive to your potential audience like in the Denmark E-Commerce Company Website case study.
The keywords are properly targeted in the page title, descriptions as well as content. When optimizing the most important pages of your website, you should consider relevancy, search volume, and ranking difficulty of the keywords that you wish to target.
The content of the pages of your website will be rewritten wherever necessary. Keywords will be added wherever necessary and headings entered. There will usually be one to three main focus keywords as well as lots of related and long tail keywords.
Finally the title tags, description meta tag, ALT tags (for images) as well as canonical tags will be entered. The SEO consultant may also check up the indexing settings if a plugin is used and block unnecessary pages from getting indexed like tag pages in a WordPress website.
In short if you have a small business website where the total pages is less than 75 or so, for a SEO Audit, keyword research, content writing guidance, SEO Copy editing, writing the various tags such as title tags, description meta tag etc. as well as entering the optimised content the minimum price will be around Indian Rs 60,000 ( € 750) for optimising 5 pages. Any other work done will cost extra. Some SEO consultants will in addition also do a limited amount of internal linking, create and submit an XML sitemap, setup your webmaster tools accounts on Google and Bing as well a few more tasks at no extra cost. You can also opt for a Small business SEO package like the one described in this website.
Again this will depend on the complexity of your website. For a complex site structure like a multi-site targeting several countries and languages the cost will go up. This is because checking the technical aspects of the site takes much more time. Add the cost of on-page SEO of the remaining pages (approx Rs 8000 ( € 100) per web page - this will hold as a minimum rate when lots of pages have to be optimized, and as an add-on basis. For detailed pages of more than 2000 words it will be even more).
For your reference this are the rates for just SEO Copy editing on a leading freelance website.
Content Writing
A good content writer (freelancer), well versed in writing will charge a minimum of Rs 5 per word. A blog post or web page has to be at least 1,500 words and include all relevant details on the topic. It has to also include closely related words to your main topic. Several studies have shown that the average length of a page that ranks in Google’s top 10 results is 1500 words. So it is around Rs 7,500 ( € 94)for a page. For bulk deals it may be possible to get a discount.
For your reference this are the rates for content writing on a leading freelance website.
Technical Changes
Your website structure has to be proper so that the website can be properly indexed by search engines. The urls should preferably be descriptive and there should not be any duplicate content on your website. You can find more details on checking and correcting website structure, speed and many other technical aspects in Website Onpage and Technical SEO Audit. In case technical changes are required for your website you have to factor the cost of that too. Here you may also have to consider the charges of a paid module. This will depend on what content management platform has been implemented for your website. For example a WordPress website will necessarily require a SEO plugin like Yoast as well as a few more plugins. Some of them rquire a fair bit of configuration and testing.
For your reference this are the rates for installing WordPress plugins on a leading freelance website.
Additional Considerations for E-Commerce Websites
Firstly your on Page and technical SEO has to be in order.
The e-commerce software that you have in place must satisfy the basic requirements i.e. Unique page titles & descriptions, no duplicate content (Same content two urls) - This usually happens when the same product is in two categories and the CMS (content management system) generates two urls for the same product page.
Unique Product Descriptions
An e-commerce website has to make sure that the product descriptions well written and different from the product manufacturers descriptions that are found on a large number of websites. It is always preferred to write the product descriptions yourself and then get then brushed up by a professional or you could employ a professional writer with expertise in your field.
Note that in cases, when the content for individual products may be very less, it makes better sense to optimize your category pages, which should be around 1,500 words or more.
Product Photography
Good photographs of the products from various angles have to be displayed. In addition the url of the page must not change when the user changes the displayed picture. For example the front view, back view and side view are necessary if one is displaying apparel.
About The Author
Joseph de Souza is a leading Freelance SEO consultant and Web developer in Goa, India with more than 15 years of experience in internet marketing.
He has a proven track record and has has helped several companies increase their traffic many times over and thereby increase their revenue and profits.
Besides English, Joseph has also successfully optimized two German language websites and a Danish language website and obtained outstanding results.