How much should SEO cost?

How long is a piece of string? This is what I should respond, when asked the question. In reality I can't give this kind of response and I won't. I always go away, analyse and come up with the best SEO cost estimate possible.

It is notoriously difficult to cost SEO projects. There are two basic ways of looking at SEO costing. One way is to stick to a fixed amount of SEO work and see how far you can improve your rankings. The other way is to analyse all 'controllable' variables, estimate the time it takes to reach required target ranking results and than work out the budget.

In a way, both methods are floored because nobody controls all elements affecting SEO. Both methods contain an element of delivery risk and both methods risk leaving customers disappointed with the results of SEO campaigns. No SEO company can guarantee results because no SEO company controls neither search engines nor their customer's competitors activities.

I always tell my customers that SEO is about following a structured process and is not at all black magic. I also tell them that the actual optimisation effort required, varies depending on target industry, target audience and target search engines. It is always better to set realistic expectations.

The bottom line is this. If I optimise a website for very competitive search terms (i.e. mortgage), in a very competitive industry (property finance) with many cash-rich companies (i.e. banks) I am less likely to achieve good rankings. The risk of not achieving is high and that risk has to be priced into the SEO cost.