I asked 200 Agencies about SEO and Website costs. Here is What I found

I analyzed ~200 Agencies from India to understand how they price their services.

Specifically, I looked at the costs of doing monthly SEO and the cost of making a website from scratch. I also found out if these agencies do spammy SEO practices or not.

And in this post, I’m going to share what we found.

Watch this video if you want a detailed breakdown of the study

Key Findings

• The minimum cost of the website was just $61.
• The maximum cost was $9790 for a custom build website. 
• Most agencies charged $1-$500 for building a website.
• The content writing costs were from $0.0092- $0.037 per word.
• The minimum cost for doing Monthly SEO is $61. 
• The Maximum cost of monthly SEO is $9790
• The cost of SEO per page/keyword starts from $12. 
• Most of the monthly SEO cost is between $1-$500. 
• The most popular backlink is Article Submission. Social Bookmarking (SBM) is the second most popular backlink. 
• The amount of money you pay for your SEO doesn’t matter because the quality of services will be almost the same. (in terms of backlinks) 

Prerequisites

The idea behind this study was to understand how much agencies charge their clients. My main plan to do the study was to find out if they use spammy practices or not. For finding that, I used backlinks as a factor. 

To give you more context, here are some details:

• I contacted 198 Agencies from all across India
• The agencies were from 23 main cities in India, covering each region. 
• 54 agencies were from North India, 68 were from West India, 46 were from South India, 22 were from East India, and 8 were from North East India. 
• Out of 198, only 98 agencies responded. So in total, the data you will see is from 98 agencies.
• And out of 98, only 80 agencies gave me all the info I needed. Rest 18 only gave me pricing. 
• This data have been collected by emailing, calling, and texting the respective agencies. 

Another important thing to note:

There were many agencies that hadn’t responded. I grouped that data into these nine groups:

1. Didn’t give pricing: I contacted them, and they asked for details but never shared pricing. 
2. No response after messaging multiple times: I tried messaging them multiple times, but nobody on their team responded even once. 
3. No response after giving details: I gave details, but they haven’t responded to anything
4. Imposing conditions before quote: They asked me to either fill out a long form, meet in person, or provide visiting cards or a company profile to provide any info. 
5. No response for backlinks: They gave me pricing but didn’t tell me how they build backlinks.
6. No response after the call: They called me and promised to give pricing but haven’t responded. 
7. Special cases: One was very rude, one didn’t respond because I wrote their company spelling wrong, and one said that they have shifted their operations to another country.
8. No reply: Didn’t reply to my emails or messages.
9. Wrong number: The number they mentioned on the site was wrong, or no contact was found on the website. 

Here is a graph for the same:

The interesting thing to note here is that there are many agencies who dont respond to the calls. This can be frustrating for the client and they will seek out other options. 

Also, before reaching out to them, I took a look at their website and there are some interesting things I found:

• Some websites had capital letters in their URL
• Some URLs were directed to porn sites, 
• The User Experience of some was beyond horrible
• Some had Google Vignette ads (ones that cover the full page)
• Some websites are more horizontal than the traditional vertical page.
• Some websites had excessive animations
• Some websites had excessive keyword stuffing. 
• Some even had the keywords like “best digital marketing agency in [city name]” in their URLs.
• And many websites have right-clicked, inspect, and view sources disabled.

These are very interesting findings. Because if their own website is so 2005, then how can they make a good website for their clients?

Note: All of the data presented is in USD. If you are looking to get this data in INR, then you can fill the form below:

The Cost of Website Development

For asking the cost of the website, I asked how much a 40-page website would cost, and the results are (almost) shocking:

The minimum cost of a website was just $61. (For 40 pages)

And the maximum cost was $9790. This was the cost of making a custom website and it would have very advanced functionality (this is what I was told). 

Here is a graph to illustrate the costs:

Here is a breakdown of this graph:

Cost	Number of Companies
$1- $500	48.7%
$501 – $1,000	25.6%
$1,001 – $1,500	7.7%
$1,501 – $2,000	10.3%
$2,000 – $2,500	2.6%
$2,501 – $10,000	5.1%

As you can see, most agencies charged $1-$500. This is very less if you compare it to the cost of making a website in the US, which starts from $5000.

The interesting to note here is, some agencies gave free domain and hosting with the website design cost. And many asked for the hosting and domain to be paid for by the client. 

The time frame in which they were told to build the website was anywhere from 30 days to 120 days. 

Some representatives also asked for content. When asked, they revealed that the content will cost from $0.0092- $0.037. 

The majority of agencies were providing content writing for less than $0.024 a word. But there was a handful who charged $0.037 per word.

So that means, a 1000-word blog written at $0.024 would be:

1000 X 0.024 = $24

Similarly, with $0.037, it would be:

1000 X 0.037 = $37

The Cost of SEO

Similar to the website development, I asked how much it will cost to do SEO on 40 pages. 

The findings were interesting. Some agencies gave a fixed cost per page, while some gave a cost per keyword.

The cost per page/keyword starts from $12. 

Meaning, if I ask for 40 pages or 40 keywords, then the cost would be:

40 X $12= $480

Let’s talk about the monthly cost:

The minimum cost for doing SEO was $61. And the Maximum cost was $9790. (Interestingly, the numbers are the same for SEO and Website development)

Here is a pie chart that shows the cost break up:

This graph is very fascinating. Let us look at the table to understand the numbers:

Cost	No of companies
$1- $500	75.2%
$501 – $1,000	17.1%
$1,001 – $1,500	5.1%
$1,501 – $2,000	0.9%
$2,001 – $3,000	0.9%
$3,000+	0.9%

As you can see both from the chart and the table, most of the SEO cost is between $1-$500. 

Specifically, most agencies were charging $1-$244. 

Some websites gave the on-page cost as a one-time, and only build backlinks each upcoming month. 

From my understanding, they dont write too many blogs on the website, but their main focus is to build as many links as they can (main focus on quantity).

The Spammy Link Building

The main idea behind this study was to find out whether or not they follow Google’s recommended Guidelines or not. 

Being worked at an agency myself, I had already predicted some results, and seeing this data, I reconfirmed it. 

As the agency won’t say that they do spammy practices, I chose to know what kind of backlinks they build. 

Because once we know what backlinks they build, we can get an understanding of how these agencies operate. 

Here is a bar graph that shows the same:

Let me make a table to understand this data:

Type of backlink	Percentage
Article Submission	11.8%
Social Bookmarking (SBM)	11.5%
Classifieds	10.8%
Guest Posting	9.3%
Image Submission	5.9%
Directory Submission	5.9%
Blog Submission	4.0%
Press Release	3.7%
Forum Submission	3.7%
Profile Creation	3.4%
Blog Commenting	3.4%
Business Listing	3.1%
PDF Submission	3.1%
Video Submission	2.8%
Infographic Submission	2.5%
Q & A Submission	2.5%
Web 2.0	2.5%
Quora Answer	2.2%
PPT Submission	1.9%
Search Engine Submission	1.9%
Broken Link Building	1.2%
Paid Links	0.9%
Ping Submission	0.9%
Competitor Link Building	0.6%
Digital PR	0.6%

So according to the data, the most popular backlink is article submission. After that, Social Bookmarking (SBM) is the second most popular backlink. 

There are some backlinks which good than others, and these are:

1. Broken Link Building
2. Digital PR

But the fact that these are very less made by agencies speaks a lot. 

There are some companies which are only relied on Digital PR and this is very interesting to note as they dont do any other kind of backlink building. 

Let’s understand how these “spammy” backlinks work

The managers set a target, that we need to make 100 article submissions or 200 classifieds this month. 

The other SEOs find websites from the web (related to these) and make a list. The goal is to find websites that have DR higher than 40 and Spam scores of less than 5% (these are looked through extensions like Mozbar).

The list is then cleaned and work is started. The goal is to make specified backlinks (200) or more than that. 

And that’s how it is done.   

The Findings

The study led to some interesting findings. 

The first and most obvious one is the huge variation in the pricing model. 

Both SEO and website-making charges start from $61 and go up to $9790.

This makes us question, whether is there any difference between a $100 service and a $5000 service.

It turns out, there isn’t much.

For the website, the agency promised to make a website from scratch (either in WP or custom), and they will make the site like how I showed them. 

Secondly, many agencies had very trashy kinds of sites. And when I say trash, it is really bad. The user experience is HORRIBLE. Some even looked like they haven’t been updated since 2010. 

Many didn’t have enough info on their sites. And the worst thing? They had the wrong phone number on the site. 

And I dont know why, but these agencies were not responsive at all. The response rate was very low.

They dont like reading emails, or even replying to them. I tried messaging them on WhatsApp, but they didn’t answer. (Not even once). 

Another thing to note here is if these agencies are charging less prices to their clients, then how much are they paying to their employees?

Let’s say an agency is charging $200 to a client, then how much are they paying to their employee? I bet not more than $100. 

And this can be why SEO professionals in India are not being paid more, despite their work.

Another thing is that with the rising price of SEO, the backlink strategy is not changed much. 

Meaning, even if the company charges $9k for monthly SEO, they still are building article submissions and guest posting kind of links. 

So what does this mean? This means that the amount of money you pay for your SEO doesn’t matter because the quality of services will be almost the same. 

Final Words

This study was fun to work on and I discovered a bunch of stuff.

I’d like to hear from you:

What’s your #1 takeaway from this Agencies study?

Or maybe you have a question about something that you read.

Either way, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Comment on your tweets by using the #AgencyStudy and I will retweet the best ones.