The cost per click depends on the volume of people using the target search phrase, the number of competitors bidding for the target phrases, and the quality of the ad and target landing page. Dentists, for example, can easily pay $15 per click or more because there isn’t a huge volume of people searching for a dentist at any one time, yet there are lots of dentists out there bidding up the rate.  Real estate agents are typically in the $2 to $3 per click range depending on the market; there tends to be many people searching for homes for sale at any one time, although there is also a lot of competition for placement. And lawyers pay a huge amount per click — mostly because they can afford to bid and pay high amounts since the value of a single new client makes the high bids worthwhile. Ultimately, though, while we can give a pretty good guess on the cost of a click, you won’t know for sure until you actually implement a new project how much the average cost per click will be.

Google ads and organic SEO have the advantage that they show your website to a person while they are actively searching for what you are selling.  But for lots of businesses, the marketing objective is to generate awareness or brand recognition. Facebook ads can be an incredibly cost-effective way to introduce your company to the perfect demographic audience. For example, if you were a wedding planner, you could show ads to females between 22 and 32 years old who live in Toronto and who are engaged to be married (14,800 people on Facebook in this demographic).  A fancy restaurant in London Ontario could target Facebook ads to people living within 40 kilometres of the city who are employed in business and financial operations (4,600 people). If you have an identifiable demographic audience, there is usually a way on Facebook to show your ads to those people, often for a fraction of a penny per impression.

The short answer to this question is, ‘Yes, you can try to do it yourself’.  But it isn’t as easy as it might look on the surface.  It is almost impossible for non-professionals to be successful with an organic SEO program unless they are incredibly lucky or in a very uncompetitive market.  And while pay-per-click options are available to anyone, the user-interfaces are getting more and more complicated, and the features such as ‘remarketing’ are more complex to implement.  Combine the complicated interface with the fact that the campaigns need to be monitored continually to stave off ‘bid creep’ (where your average bid creeps up over time) among other wasteful occurrences, and for many people it is just far more cost-effective to leave it to the professionals.

If you talk to 100 different SEO firms about “what it costs”, you’ll likely get 100 different prices. Everyone has a different strategy to achieve placement. Some firms charge what we feel are exorbitant rates. Others charge reasonable or low rates but do virtually nothing. So how do you make a decision?

If you are a marketing agency or web developer, please contact us and we’ll get you the typical “ballpark” rates for a project over the phone or by email. If you are an end-user company, please have your web developer contact us. 416-823-6095

We have tons of references (mostly in Ontario but some in other provinces and the U.S. as well) who can verify that we know what we’re doing!