Dialing in your dental SEO efforts is a huge piece of the marketing puzzle these days. It’s tough to bring in new dental patients without having an online lead generation platform.

At the same time, figuring out how much to spend on dental SEO can be a bit of a challenge. Prices are a little bit all over the place. Expect to spend at least $3000 to get started, and anywhere between $1000 and $2000 (or more) for ongoing SEO work.

On the surface, that might feel like a pretty stiff price tag to pay to get your dental site at the top of Google results.

When you dig into how competitive these kinds of keywords are (even locally) – as well as how skyhigh the return on investment for this type of marketing is – you learn pretty quickly that it’s almost always well worth the premium price tag for quality SEO work.

Let’s jump in.

How Much Does Dental SEO Cost?

As mentioned a moment ago, you should expect to spend anywhere between $2000 and $3000 (and sometimes a little more) on dental SEO work when you are just getting established.

This is the absolute baseline amount of money that a quality SEO outfit is going to charge to:

• Do an in-depth SEO audit on your existing web presence
• Come up with detailed keyword research, not just for your site but for all of your competitors as well
• Craft a strategic SEO plan to get you to the top of Google ASAP and
• Implement baseline work to build a foundation for your SEO efforts

After that, you’ll also want to pony up for ongoing Dental SEO services from legitimate and reputable SEO experts.

Far too many people in the dental world (and across a whole bunch of other business niches as well) get suckered into the impression that SEO is sort of “one and done” marketing.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

No, you’re going to need to constantly add to your existing SEO “infrastructure” by building new back links, generating SEO optimized content, etc.

You’re also going to need experts “at the switch” paying attention to the SEO landscape on a day-to-day basis so that you can get out ahead of major changes that could shuffle you to the back of Google if you weren’t paying attention.

This is why finding the right SEO experts to do business with in the first place is so important.

You want to build a real relationship with these kinds of experts, relying on them to handle this huge part of online success for you (almost in a partnership) so that you can focus on other aspects of your dental operation.

SEO Service Choices Influence Price

Of course, the type of SEO services you choose to take advantage of will have a huge impact on the prices you pay.

Here are just a couple of payment structures that SEO experts offer as well as our recommendation of the best ones for you moving forward.

Pay Per Project

Pay per project services are generally the most popular way to get started with SEO experts.

Think of this as a “first date” kind of deal structure.

You come in with clearly outlined goals, let the SEO experts know exactly what those goals are, and then work together to achieve those goals – all while constantly evaluating the SEO people you’re working with to determine if they are the right fit for the long haul.

If you haven’t ever worked with SEO experts in the past this is the way you want to hit the ground running.

Doing Dental SEO yourself is difficult. Reach out to Up Digital if you want a completely hands off approach and fantastic results!

On the one hand, it can be a little bit expensive to pony up money for a “pay per project” kind of arrangement – at least initially.

On the other hand, though, you’re not stuck paying a mountain of money to SEO “experts” that might not be as talented or as successful as they let you to believe earlier for an extended amount of time with an ongoing retainer agreement.

Ongoing Retainer

After you’ve worked with SEO experts on a couple of projects (and have enjoyed the results), though, you might want to switch to an ongoing retainer.

Instead of calling them up when you need SEO work done, hoping that they have availability to help you, and (usually) being forced to shop around to a bunch of different SEO specialists because your first choice was booked up, a retainer makes all of that go away.

For a monthly fee (often at least $1000, and sometimes much more than that) you basically get your own in-house SEO department without actually having to bring them on as full-time employees.

‍

The big benefit here, of course, is that you continue to expand the relationship that you’ve built with specific technical experts.

‍

They know what’s worked in the past for you, they know what hasn’t, and they can develop a sort of “shorthand” for your future SEO efforts that don’t require starting from scratch every time you bring on a new group of professionals.

A monthly retainer for talented SEO experts more than pays for itself in new leads, new business, and a flood of targeted traffic flowing in almost nonstop!

Hourly Payouts

Hourly payouts can work for SEO experts that need to be brought in for very specific “tuneups” or when you want to hire specialists in a very specific area of SEO that your regular agency may not excel in.

Expect to spend anywhere between $150 and $300 or more for an hour’s worth of time from these professionals. It might be even more than that, depending entirely on what you want these professionals to pull off for you.

Sometimes, though, it’s a lot less expensive to pay for a couple of hours of work rather than ponying up the money for a huge per project fee or a monthly retainer.

That’ll be decided on a situation by situation basis, though.

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, though, your main focus shouldn’t be (exclusively) on how much you’re spending for dental SEO work.

It should be finding a quality SEO operation you can trust, one that produces results and a positive ROI on this investment, and an operation that’s going to help you grow your business consistently.

If you’re SEO is working the way it should you’re going to be making far more money than it costs to bring in new clients and new patients!

If you're looking for more info on Dental SEO, take a look at our article on "How to choose a Dental SEO Company".

‍