- May 16, 2023
- by S M Shakil Ahmed
- SEO News
- 0 Comments
Although we are familiar with the concept of investing in Shopify SEO Service, it’s important to understand the actual costs involved.
This guide will provide you with information about the various aspects of Shopify SEO and give you an idea of the financial commitment required for each of them.
However, the key distinguishing factor is:
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Do You Want Results or Boxes Checked?
The description of SEO as a service is often vague, similar to the lack of clarity found in descriptions of health supplements. It fails to provide clear information regarding what exactly you are purchasing, including the quantity, hours, prioritization, or quality of the service.
If you decide to hire a box-checking agency for $1,000 per month, here’s what typically happens:
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In contrast, a results-focused agency, although potentially more expensive, offers a different approach:
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The main distinction lies in the fact that box checking may give you high SEO scores initially, but after 12 months, you’ll find yourself $12,000 poorer with missed potential revenue amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is because effective SEO should be centered around achieving specific outcomes and objectives, such as generating revenue. This is especially crucial for Shopify, where prioritizing SEO across numerous SKUs and collections is necessary.
I suggest considering a per-page and per-solution approach that focuses on the potential return on investment (ROI) for each. This way, you avoid paying for SEO fixes without a clear purpose.
It all begins with implementing scalable solutions:
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Shopify Page Redesigns And Restructuring Cost
The architecture and layout of your Shopify store pages can significantly impact your potential SEO revenue by up to 30%, without even considering the improvements in conversion rates. What’s more, these enhancements can be implemented once and their effects will multiply across all your pages. This aspect should be your top priority.
These modifications encompass various aspects such as incorporating internal linking structures, implementing mega menus, ensuring support for additional content without negatively affecting conversions, and making design improvements focused on conversion rate optimization (CRO). These changes will primarily target collection pages, product pages, and the homepage. However, if your blog receives substantial traffic, they can also be applied to its design.
Here are the typical price ranges for page redesign services in 2023:
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The expense of implementing these improvements is likely to be significantly higher than the cost of using a pre-made theme. However, when considering the amplified impact that these enhancements can have on your overall SEO efforts, the benefits are expected to far outweigh the costs.
Without implementing these changes, it will be difficult to fully leverage your total addressable market (TAM) through SEO. Therefore, I would emphasize that this aspect is absolutely essential in the overall process.
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Shopify Technical SEO Cost
Another significant and multiplier effect-driven change involves addressing technical SEO issues that arise from using Shopify.
These issues encompass resolving problems such as canonicalized internal links, automated page noindexing, structuring breadcrumbs, implementing hreflang support, and minimizing wasted crawl budget.
The extent of work required in this area varies based on the number of products and collections within your store. However, here are some typical ranges for the associated tasks:
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Collection Page SEO Cost
To enhance the SEO of each collection within your store, an SEO team will undertake various tasks such as conducting keyword research, improving SEO titles, H1 tags, and meta descriptions, creating high-quality content, editing existing content, analyzing competitors, and establishing internal linking strategies.
Consequently, the most effective approach to estimating costs is to consider them on a per-page basis. The level of thoroughness with which these tasks are executed, as well as the quality of the content produced, directly influence the associated expenses.
The involvement of a skilled SEO specialist for page analysis and strategic planning, along with a talented copywriter, can contribute to the overall costs. Here are the typical ranges for optimizing a single collection:
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Product Page SEO Cost
Just like with collection page SEO, the analysis and improvement of product pages should be assessed on a per-product basis, which means costs should be evaluated in a similar manner.
It’s important to recognize that not all products require the same level of SEO efforts, and not all products need improvement in terms of SEO.
The tasks involved in optimizing product pages typically include keyword research, optimization of titles, H1 tags, and meta descriptions, as well as SEO-driven copywriting.
When it comes to copywriting for product pages, it may intersect with other departments and may not be directly managed by the SEO team.
The extent of work required for each product page will depend on its potential SEO traffic value. Here are the typical price ranges for enhancing a single product page, based on the necessary scope dictated by its SEO potential:
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Shopify Blog Post Cost
To accurately determine the associated costs, the analysis of blog post-related work should be done on a per-post basis.
The scope of this work encompasses several tasks, including researching content ideas, creating outlines based on topical research, writing the actual blog post, copy editing, optional custom image design, and implementing internal linking from previous content to ensure favorable search engine rankings.
Once again, the cost of these tasks is heavily influenced by the quality of the work being delivered. The involvement of designers and/or photographers is necessary for custom image creation, which can add to the expenses. However, investing in custom images can be highly beneficial for the right content pieces.
Furthermore, the quality of the written content can vary depending on whether it is outsourced to inexpensive offshore writers, who may not perform well, or entrusted to niche experts, who command higher fees.
Considering these factors, here are the typical price ranges for a single blog post in 2023:
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Link Building Cost
The final component to include in your Shopify SEO strategy is link building. This involves reaching out to other websites to obtain backlinks pointing to your store, collections, products, or blog content. Acquiring these backlinks is crucial for achieving higher rankings in Google Search.
To better understand the cost associated with link building, it is advisable to consider it on a per backlink basis.
Acquiring a single backlink involves several steps. This includes creating a list of potential outreach targets, crafting personalized outreach emails and offers, sending out emails, following up with the targets, and negotiating the details of link placement. In the case of guest posts, content writing may also be required.
Here is an estimate of the cost per individual backlink:
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To put it differently, if you run a smaller eCommerce store with an annual revenue of a few million dollars or less, you can expect to spend around $1,250 to $5,000 per month in order to acquire 5-10 backlinks on a monthly basis.
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Full Shopify SEO Campaign
Combining all of these elements into a coherent campaign that includes reporting, continuous analysis, strategy adjustments, and project management incurs additional expenses.
A highly effective Shopify SEO campaign for a small to midsize business (SMB) typically ranges from $5,000 to $10,000 per month.
For enterprise-level Shopify SEO, where you are competing against well-known brands, the costs can escalate to $20,000 to $30,000 or more per month.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean you will be paying an SEO agency or consultant this exact amount, as there may be some overlap with your internal resources and other experts like copywriters, editors, and designers.
To summarize, the typical expenses involved in an overall Shopify SEO campaign are:
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Although it may appear to be a substantial investment, considering that your SEO Total Addressable Market (TAM) surpasses one million dollars annually, allocating 10-20% of that amount to achieve your goals is not considered expensive. In fact, opting for low-cost SEO can ultimately prove to be more costly.
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Final Verdict
It’s crucial to recognize that not all agencies operate under a comprehensive retainer model.
At Logeix, we firmly believe that collaborating with your team yields the best SEO campaigns. This approach involves utilizing your internal resources to provide support in areas such as development, content writing, and product knowledge whenever applicable.
By adopting this approach, we are able to offer highly specialized services, including:
- Store Strategy Plan – This includes Shopify page redesigns, technical SEO, and keyword research for expanding collections.
- Page Plans – We develop collection and product page plans with implementation and SEO content.
- Link Building – We facilitate the acquisition of backlinks to enhance your site’s authority.
What sets us apart is that we don’t require retainers, deliver unnecessary fluff, or inundate you with excessive reporting that goes unread.
As a result, our campaigns are more cost-effective, efficient, and successful, all without the need for contracts or retainers.
If you’re interested, we encourage you to get in touch with us to discuss pricing.
Why is Investing This Much in SEO Worth it?
For certain Shopify stores, investing in SEO may not seem necessary or feasible at first glance.
However, the crucial factor to consider is the potential return on investment (ROI), which can be determined by examining the traffic value of your most successful competitors.
Let’s say your competitors have a traffic value (estimated cost of acquiring that traffic through paid means) of $3,500,000 per year, while your current revenue stands at only $200,000 per year. In this case, there is a significant Total Addressable Market (TAM) that justifies investing in SEO.
Furthermore, if we assess a specific collection and find that it has a value of $20,000 per month, it becomes much easier to rationalize spending $600 to create an exceptionally well-optimized page.
On the other hand, for some businesses, investing in SEO may not be warranted. This is where the concept of ROI-focused SEO comes into play.
If you are curious about the SEO potential of your store, we offer a free analysis of traffic value potential. You can request this analysis by following this link.
