I hung up the phone feeling frustrated, but the client call went perfectly. Our agency had successfully ranked them for every keyword they were targeting. They even renewed for another year.
So why was I frustrated?
As I went over the client’s results, I remembered all the time and money we put into their website’s SEO. Sure we were profitable, but I kept thinking about the actual cost it took for us to rank them for their most valuable keywords.
Some keywords were actually easier to rank for than I expected, but others took more time – and a lot more of our budget – than I would’ve liked.
It wasn’t that we misquoted them. We spend enough time on our proposals to make sure that doesn’t happen. But I was starting to feel like something in our process was missing.
The Problem With How Most Agencies Price Their SEO Services
Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before.
Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month.
The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally.
So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal.
That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it.
Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise.
Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too.
You can see it for yourself here.
The New Keyword Cost Estimator Tool
The Keyword Cost Estimator is an easy to use web app. It can drastically speed up keyword research and the time it takes to draft a proposal for clients.
We built The Keyword Cost Estimator with efficiency in mind. That’s why it works like a simple calculator. To find the cost of ranking keywords we just type in the keyword we want to rank for, and then hit the “estimate cost” button. That’s it.
Within seconds we get a precise estimate of the cost to rank our keyword. It even lets us input multiple keywords at once and export the results to a neatly formatted pdf.
How Does It Work?
We’ve put 10+ years of our SEO experience into creating the formulas that power this app. Determining the time and cost needed to rank for a keyword requires looking at many different factors. We take into account multiple KPIs including: Domain Authority, Keyword Ranking Difficulty, Search Volume, and more.
Our proprietary formulas are powered by live data from the SEMrush API. SEMrush is one of the most respected names in the SEO industry. We chose their API due to the impressive breadth of data it gives us access to.
The Keyword Cost Estimator has access to:
- 120,000,000 keywords
- 427,000,000 domains
- 38,439,000,000,000 backlinks
- HIstorical Data going back to 2012
We’ve taken the time to fine tune The Keyword Cost Estimator to make sure its outputs were consistent with our real lived experience. After spending over a decade getting real results for clients, we’ve been able to successfully replicate the process of an experienced SEO.
That’s why we stand by the accuracy of The Keyword Cost Estimator, and even use it for quoting our own clients.
Saving Time and Increasing Transparency With Clients
After starting to use The Keyword Cost Estimator we drastically reduced the time it took to send proposals to clients.
Our team loves it because it cuts out the most tedious and time consuming parts of the research process. Now preparing quotes to clients only takes minutes – instead of days.
Our clients love it too. It’s much quicker and easier to send them an estimate on the cost of ranking a keyword. We’re also finding that sending them an exact number makes a big difference. A lot of them appreciate having a clear picture of how expensive some keywords are compared to others. It makes our pricing a lot more transparent.
We’ve been seeing that having this added transparency in our pricing helps our clients better understand the value we provide. They can clearly see the time and budget that goes into ranking for each keyword, and know what we’re spending the most time on for their business.
Try The Keyword Cost Estimator For Your Business
We’ve seen a noticeable improvement in our operations and our relationship with our clients since using The Keyword Cost Estimator.
We’ve struggled with constant questions on the cost of ranking certain keywords, and long hours of research just to draft a proposal. We know what it’s like to deal with these problems on a daily basis, and that’s why we’re happy to share this tool.
It’s exciting to think how agencies everywhere will use this tool to improve their own relationships with their clients, and become more efficient.
If you’re looking for a way to make your keyword research more efficient give it try.