What an SEO Partnership Looks Like and How Much It Costs

An SEO partnership with WooAcademy costs from €480 per month; a one-off SEO audit is €480, keyword research €936, an hour of on-page work €48 and a backlink from €250. The first results usually come within 3 to 6 months. The price of SEO doesn’t depend on how big the website is or who built it, but on how many hours of work fit into a month. I wrote this article in 2020, when clients most often asked me what an SEO specialist actually does and what they’re paying for. The rules still apply; prices and tools have moved on, so in 2026 I updated it with current numbers, AI search and a month-by-month process. The original text stayed, and the additions are marked.

• SEO service from €480 / month
• SEO audit €480, keyword research €936
• On-page work €48 / hour
• Backlinks from €250
• Results in 3 to 6 months
• Updated 6 Oct 2026

Most people running online projects already know that SEO sells, can be measured and is worth investing in. What’s less known is how the partnership works, the specific optimization steps, the price and what to expect. Let’s look at everything SEO involves.

SEO for €200 to €300 is perfectly realistic. How do you do it?

SEO is done the same way for €100 as for €10,000; you just get much less done for €100, so the results come more slowly. That’s the only thing that affects the price of SEO, nothing else. Of course, we’re talking about honest SEO from a real SEO specialist, for example me (Milan Fraňo). I’ve written separately about honest and dishonest SEO, because that’s exactly where it’s decided whether €200 buys you four hours of work or four hours of excuses.

Quick SEO tactics (not strategy) – not only for WordPress

This is the list I start with on most projects, in the order it makes sense to do it. These are tactics, not strategy: strategy tells you which keywords and when; tactics tell you what physically gets done on the website.

1. Technical fixes – speeding up the site, removing unnecessary plugins, adding the Rank Math SEO plugin, adjusting site functionality, checking and fixing sitemaps and robots.txt, connecting social networks, adding and marking up structured data, connecting Tag Manager, Search Console, Google Analytics and so on. How to speed up your site without changing the theme is covered in the guide how to speed up WordPress and WooCommerce.
2. UX / CX fixes – removing the flaws that prevent purchases or put visitors off buying = adjusting site functionality and visuals. Most often: a contact form that doesn’t work on mobile, a four-step checkout, a price hidden behind a button.
3. Website content – editing the site’s copy: blog categories, old articles, product categories, product descriptions, page copy, and editing and expanding product and article categories. On an online store, categories matter more than the blog, because that’s where people search for what you sell.
4. Image SEO – optimizing images and media files on the site. Format, size, file name and alt text, covered in detail in the article Google Images and image SEO.
5. Site architecture and internal linking – so that every important page links on to the next one and both Google and people understand what’s primary and what’s secondary. The process is in the article internal linking for SEO.
6. Content SEO – creating SEO content on the site and publishing articles. Not articles for the sake of articles, but an article for a keyword people search for that leads to a product.
7. Link building – acquiring relevant backlinks. More on that below.
8. YouTube SEO – optimizing video copy and the channel profile. Videos now appear directly in Google results and in AI answers, so I count them as part of SEO.
9. Local SEO – optimizing the profile, creating content and a virtual tour. For a business with a physical address, the Google Business Profile is often more important than the whole website.
10. Reporting, data checks, optimization – without numbers you don’t know whether any of this works. I set up SEO reporting in Looker Studio once and then we look at it every month.

I get the fastest SEO results on my own projects (online stores and services). I’m not limited by budget, by time spent getting copy approved, or by waiting for a client’s developer to make page changes and approve the proposed strategy. Exactly these three things (approvals, developers, budget) most often slow down client projects too, which is why I sort them out right at the start of a partnership.

Keyword research

This is where all of SEO begins. Keyword research is a must for most online projects. Whether it’s full keyword research, a content gap analysis, or just pulling a few shortlisted keywords from a tool like Marketing Miner to check monthly search volumes, related terms, competition, CPC and so on.

What is keyword research good for and what can it bring?

From the research you shortlist the words people search for and for which your website has a chance to rank higher in the search results (SEO difficulty). Some keywords are simply very competitive, and the first page is taken by strong websites you’d find very hard to beat in a short time.

Keyword research saves you, for example, the time you’d otherwise spend writing irrelevant blog articles that have no chance of reaching the first page of Google. And without keyword research (if it’s good, it doesn’t matter what form you get it in) it’s very hard to even get started with SEO.

In 2020, keyword research from WooAcademy cost between €550 and €1,000. You can also do the research yourself; we’ll gladly teach you how in a workshop. How to do it and where to start is in the article keyword research: how to do it.

On-page

You can’t do SEO without a website and content. The quality of the website and its content decides whether organic search brings you orders or whether you just throw money away and lose precious time.

When you publish a website without SEO and social activity, it’s essentially invisible. It would take a big coincidence for someone to find you and maybe convert (buy).

You should deal with SEO while the website is being built; that way you avoid some unpleasant site changes later. Not all web developers understand SEO and build websites with at least the basic settings, architecture and so on. That’s why any website I build or review during website development has SEO set up before launch, not after.

What do I do first in a partnership?

When a client approaches me with an SEO project, the first things I do are:

1. Check how many keywords the site is indexed for using Marketing Miner. If the site shows up for 30 keywords and the competition for 3,000, I know where we stand and how much work lies ahead.
2. Check how many pages are indexed and whether the site has any problems with tools like Screaming Frog or Website Auditor, and uncover the main issues: duplicate titles, missing H1s, redirect chains, noindexed pages that should be in the index.
3. Ask for access to Google Analytics, Search Console and the website. You can’t do SEO without Search Console, because that’s the only place you see what the site shows up for and what gets clicked. I show how to add Analytics to WordPress in a video.
4. Check the backlinks – how many there are, where they come from and whether any of them are hurting the site.
5. Propose a strategy and tactics – which keywords, which pages, in what order and for how many hours a month. An indicative price list is on the SEO services page.

What does SEO include and how much does it cost?

Some work runs in parallel; for some steps I have to wait. Here’s what I do as part of SEO on WordPress projects.

• Content creation: based on the keyword research, we choose the keywords for new content. The brief either goes to copywriters or the client writes the articles themselves. I edit and fine-tune articles from both the client and the copywriter for SEO. At the start it’s good to cover as many relevant keywords as possible with content. That’s why it’s worth starting with 5 to 15 articles (if the site has no content; if it does, reworking a lot of the old content is sometimes enough). Then publish regularly on the chosen keywords and topics. In 2020 an SEO article (4 to 6 pages long) cost around €150.
• Visual changes to the site (UX factors) – if needed, priced according to the scope of work. The basics can be fixed within 5 hours of work; in 2020 that was €145.
• Technical fixes – I speed up the site, fix the sitemap and robots.txt, optimize plugins and structured data: 4 to 6 hours.
• Internal linking of existing content and changes to site architecture (categories, subcategories, products and articles): 3 to 5 hours.
• Connecting the site to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Tag Manager, setting up conversion tracking, etc.: 2 to 3 hours at most.
• Local SEO optimization through the Google Business Profile (then Google My Business): 3 to 5 hours.
• Other services and steps as needed and depending on the chosen strategy.

80% of SEO = good content. What that kind of content looks like is in the article what a really good SEO article looks like. The remaining 20% is technical work and links, and it’s exactly that 20% that decides when your competitors have content as good as yours.

Prices are final; WooAcademy is not VAT-registered. If you want to know how the whole service works and what you get in the report, it’s in the video below.

What to watch out for when it comes to SEO pricing

Four things worth asking about one more time before you pay. I’ve seen each of them with clients who came to me after a bad experience, and I’ve summed each one up in a short video.

A one-off SEO setup for a fixed price with no further work, free SEO thrown in with a website, case studies without verifiable numbers, and first place for a keyword nobody searches for. More real-world cases are in the article SEO specialist and what my job involves, with seven SEO fails and the stories behind them.

Link building

Link building is about getting backlinks to your website. The more relevant backlinks, the better the chance of higher rankings for the URL the links point to, and for the whole domain. What exactly a backlink is and how Google evaluates it is covered in a separate article.

Simple, right?

What does link building involve?

• selecting websites, portals, magazines, forums and blogs that cover the topic you write about on your website and have decent domain authority
• choosing suitable keywords, topics and articles from which the backlinks to your website will come
• agreeing on a price or barter for buying a backlink or publishing your article with a backlink
• if the backlink is published together with an article, writing the article

Of those four points, the first one takes the most time. Finding 20 websites that are on topic, have real traffic and aren’t link farms takes longer than writing an article. And that’s exactly the step cheap link packages skip.

How much does link building cost?

If you buy backlinks yourself, prices range from €25 to €800 per backlink. Writing the article, if it’s a link with an article, costs extra.

In 2020, WooAcademy could provide link building from €350 for 5 to 6 backlinks on domains with good domain authority.

The advantage of working with a link builder is a lower price per backlink than you’d get yourself. Link builders buy backlinks in bulk, so their prices are lower.

What can link building bring?

For some keywords, the websites on page 1 of Google have lots of backlinks; for others, the websites on page 1 may have no backlinks at all.

If well-written content alone can’t get you onto page 1 of Google and your competitors have backlinks, getting 1 to 5 backlinks can help you reach page 1 and start getting website visits and potential clients.

A simple calculation: you do link building for 3 months, get at least 15 backlinks and have a chance to move 3 to 6 pages (your URLs) onto page 1 of Google for 3 to 6 keywords.

If each of these keywords is searched by 1,000 people a month = 6,000 searches a month. With a click-through rate of, say, 10% = 600 visits. With a conversion rate of 1 to 2% = 6 to 12 conversions a month from SEO from these 3 to 6 keywords. Whether that pays off depends on your product price, margin and so on.

This was a purely indicative, rough calculation and didn’t include related keywords or other factors.

What does an SEO partnership look like month by month?

Month one: audit and research; months two and three: technical work and content; from month four: links and evaluation. This section was missing from the original article, because back then I explained it to every client in person. This is what a typical partnership from €480 a month looks like for a smaller online store or service website.

Communication runs by email and one call a month to go through the report. I don’t need every title approved; I need the client to be able to answer questions about their product and for the copy to be published once it’s ready. After three months the partnership continues with no commitment; anyone who sees no change in Search Console after six months is free to leave, and I’ll tell them why in the report.

What will an SEO partnership bring, and when?

The first changes in impressions show up in Search Console after 4 to 8 weeks; clicks and orders usually grow from the third to the sixth month. In the video How to hire an SEO (Maile Ohye, Google Search Central), Google talks about four months to a year, and that matches my experience: a new website without links is closer to a year, an established website with good content and poor technical SEO closer to four months.

What gets measured, and in what order it moves:

SEO brings conversions that your competitors would otherwise get. Every query you don’t show up for shows someone else, and they don’t pay for that click. If you want to see numbers from specific projects, they’re in my SEO case studies; if you’d first like one hour on your own website, there’s the SEO consultation for €350.

Conclusion

If you need help with SEO and online marketing, don’t hesitate to contact us. If you liked this article and found it useful, feel free to share it on Facebook or tell your friends about it. If you’d like to learn more about online marketing, choose one of our courses and training sessions in Bratislava; for SEO, that’s the one-to-one SEO training, where we go through this whole process on your website.

Our online marketing services: we’ll be glad to help you promote your business online. Contact us at +421 940 634 491 or info@wooacademy.sk. I look forward to seeing you at our courses or consultations.

FAQ about SEO pricing and partnerships