If you’ve stumbled upon this article, you must have been wondering if you should consider investing in SEO services and how much SEO costs in Malaysia for your business.
“How Much Does SEO Cost?” is always what every business owner asks before starting to invest in SEO. However, depending on several factors, the answer always depends & Typically SEO specialists or agency normally will take some time to assess your niche, business models, etc. before they send you their SEO pricing.
SEO prices in Malaysia will vary significantly depending on the type of business and the amount of traffic available in a given industry. Determining the optimal costs for search engine optimization pricing is important, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.
A scale or plan tailored to your industry will help you build up your company’s online presence, creates brand trust, and boosts rankings across search engines’ results page.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about SEO pricing in Malaysia. You’ll find out what are the different types of pricing models for SEO and what variables are involved in pricing and even some unethical practices you should take note of – we’re talking about the black hat method!
How Much Does SEO Cost in Malaysia?
The common rates for freelancers, agencies, and consultants would differ based on the years of experience they have in the field. A brief overview of each of them could help you get a rough idea on the one that fits your budget.
Freelancer
The most common rates for freelancers will charge your SEO that costs from RM800 to RM5,000 in Malaysia. Freelancers tend to charge lower than agencies and consultants since they lack the necessary paid tools that could help the SEO of your website. Freelancers usually offer specific SEO tasks to businesses, if that is something you are looking for.
SEO Agencies
SEO Agencies tend to charge higher than freelancers and consultants because agencies are usually a full-service digital marketing agency, so they are looking for more long-term and broader SEO projects. Agencies also have a highly skilled team under their belt to help businesses grow, compared to freelancers and consultants that involve just one person handling everything. Pricing for SEO range from RM800 to RM12,000.
Consultants
SEO consultants charge slightly lower than agencies and higher than freelancers. This is because SEO consultants won’t actually do the work for you, instead, they offer consulting services and guide you to perform those SEO tasks yourself. The average cost for SEO in Malaysia would be between RM800 to RM8,000.
Type of SEO Pricing Based on Different Models
Let’s talk about the different types of SEO pricing models when it comes to SEO services in Malaysia or Worldwide. Here’s a simple breakdown:
SEO Pricing Hourly
For hourly SEO services, usually, it’ll be based on specific types of SEO services such as if you only want an SEO audit report or someone to write SEO content for your website. Most freelancers and consultants offer hourly services
compared to agencies. Here are some common rates for freelancers, agencies, and consultants would differ based on the years of experience they have in the field. A brief overview of each of them could help you get a rough idea on the one that fits your budget.
Agencies Hourly Rates: RM540 per hour
Freelancer Hourly Rates: RM296 per hour
Consultant Hourly Rates: RM530 per hour
SEO Pricing Monthly
Monthly retainer rates are a fixed amount of deliverables and services for a monthly payment that is paid upfront or every end of the month. Generally, agencies commonly use the monthly-retainer pricing model because agencies are run by a team of experts, not just a one-man-show. Plus, agencies have access to all kinds of professional SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush that could help to analyze your website even further.
Agencies Monthly Rates: RM12,500 per month
Freelancer Monthly Rates: RM6,000 per month
Consultant Monthly Rates: RM8,300 per month
SEO Pricing Project-based
This would be best if you have a specific campaign or project in mind. For example, if you’re a property development company, you will have several websites for each development. You could either hire one agency to handle all of your websites or hire several freelancers to handle them. Again, choosing which pricing model depends on your business and industry. You could get some suggestions through free SEO consulting services for the type of SEO pricing model you should go for.
Agencies Project Rates: RM22,720 per project
Freelancer Project Rates: RM6,660 per project
Consultant Project Rates: RM19,000 per project
What Affected Or Included SEO Price Malaysia?
There are several types of SEO services offered to businesses and individuals. Freelancers, agencies, and consultants typically provide customized SEO solutions, if needed, consisting of different SEO services at different rates. Therefore, it is a good idea to have some basic understanding of how to assess the pricing of SEO services:
SEO skills
As you would expect that anyone with more experience and highly SEO skilled will provide higher SEO performance campaigns, so a higher price could be expected. It’s crucial for you to search for a company with proper SEO experiences & case studies to support your SEO campaigns that will lead to success. Here are some basic of propose SEO skills:
1. Keyword Research
The keywords most SEO services would offer could be from a range of 10 keywords to 100 keywords, depending on your niche. Competitor keyword research could also be included whereby the SEO expert will try to find out the keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
2. Technical SEO Audit
For technical SEO, your website will be evaluated to look for issues that will affect your rankings. This includes site loading speed, and robots.txt, to name a few.
3. Google Analytics and Google Search Console Setup
If you don’t have these two setups for your website, this will already be included by default as part of the service. SEO relies heavily on these two tools, so you have to make sure your website has them.
4. SEO Content Writing
Some SEO services also offer blog writing services for your website. If you don’t have a blog yet, it’ll be best to have one as it would be very helpful for your SEO. Content and SEO works hand in hand with one another. Choosing this service will help you not only gain valuable readers for your blog but also rank higher in search engines.
5. Link building (Off-page SEO)
Link building, also known as off-page SEO, is a staple SEO service that everyone will offer to you. Your website can’t rank without any links pointing to you! This could come in the form of interview outreach, guest posting, and many more.
Be aware – there are many SEO services that offer link-building services for a cheap price. Don’t engage with them. These links are usually spammed links that could harm your website in the long run. The most common link-building SEO services that are spam links can be found on Fiverr and Upwork.
6. On-page Optimization
To ensure your website pages are SEO friendly, the SEO expert will analyze your website to make sure that your keywords are present, as well as further optimizations to help rank your website better.
7. SEO-Friendly Web Design & Development
As we have mentioned above, having a website that looks good isn’t enough to rank on the first page of search engines. Some of the SEO services will include an SEO-friendly website design and development if they are also skilled in designing and developing websites.
If you have the budget, you should consider combining their website design and development services together with their SEO services. Since they are already experts in SEO, they are knowledgeable enough to design your website that is properly optimized and search engine friendly.
Location
In order for the business to serve customers from the geographical area, how many other local businesses it competes with, and where the business is geographically served, it impacts how much SEO it will cost!
When you have multiple locations, you’ll have more sites to reference, one for each location, which means more research on improving your local SEO – hence higher cost to optimize for your SEO campaigns for different geo-location targets.
Your Current Website’s Conditions
SEO Price Malaysia is also heavily affected by how much work has to be done on your website. You’ll need to have a solid site structure, good content, and good SEO in order to get a high rank. This is a good reason for some companies to have higher prices than others.
What worked for ranking years ago no longer works today. Google keeps updating its algorithm so that the sites that work now may not work later. So you need to continually work to optimize your site and rankings.
For recent updates focusing on core web vital – that includes User Experience, if your website needs more backend work that needs optimization and re-programming from the ground up, this will take more time and cost more too.
In some cases, your SEO might be cheaper if it was done a few years ago but now requires some improvements.
Your Industry Competitive Outlook
Many industries are very competitive in Malaysia and worldwide, hence would have many more competitors in their space to compete with on search ranking. A very good example will be – a property/real estate company with high domain authority like PropertyGuru or iProperty. In some cases, some companies might have a greater budget to hire more than one SEO agency to work on their website from a different perspective to ensure the best SEO ranking outcome.
On the other hand, some industries may adopt SEO much later, and would be easy for them to get a good ranking with a relatively cheaper SEO pricing due to the nature of the industry yet to be super competitive online.
Your Target Audiences – Who?
If your business website is targeting more specific audiences, this will require more time and more SEO efforts. For example, by targeting Chinese speakers, make sure that the SEO company you choose has a solid understanding of the Chinese language. This is the same for every language you are trying to optimize.
We don’t recommend hiring services or paying anyone that does not provide excellent Chinese language competency. Visitors who visit your website will find your page unrelatable & a high drop-off rate. Therefore, your SEO optimization team will also have to provide proper SEO content writing that is high quality and in the tone or language proficiency, your target audience feels connected.
Number of Pages To Optimize & Your Marketing Goals
If you are a huge eCommerce website with more than 200 product pages, you would expect higher SEO pricing if you would like to optimize every single page on your website. On the other hand, if you are targeting international audiences instead of Local SEO or specific cities, prices are subject to vary too. It all depends on your website pages and your marketing goals in order to estimate your SEO costing
Timeline
Considering that you are looking to speed up your SEO campaign, due to the nature of SEO works and the time needed, some agencies do offer higher pricing if you want it to be done fast within the timeline given. The required amount of time to design, build and optimize pages will impact how much SEO costs. Therefore, the time required remains an important factor in cost.
How To Choose The Right SEO Provider?
Between hiring a freelancer, SEO consultant or agency, it can be confusing trying to decide which should you go for.
Here are some factors to consider before going ahead with your decision:
Budget
Do you have a huge budget to invest in SEO services or a limited budget to spend? Considering the SEO cost in Malaysia we had already breakdown for you to refer to before start investing.
There are various types of digital marketing services to invest in such as social media marketing, paid advertising, and so on.
If your budget is huge, then you can afford to spend more specifically for SEO. You could opt to hire an SEO agency to take care of all your SEO needs.
However, for smaller budgets, hiring an experienced freelancer would be the best option for your business.
Once again do not trust SEO specialist that gives you a guarantee SEO ranking with a lower price offered in the market as it also depends on a variety of factors, one of the major factors would be Google Algorithm that keeps changing the SEO game.
Competitiveness Of Your Niche
What we mean by competitiveness is how competitive your industry-related keywords are. For different industries, you may need to spend more to boost your SEO ranking due to your other competitors trying to get the top spot as well.
For less competitive industries, you don’t really need to spend that much on SEO since it will be easier to rank on the first page when there aren’t many competitors to fight against, to begin with.
If you don’t know how competitive your industry is, you can always get a free SEO consultation from any of the freelancers, agencies or consultants.
Target Audience
The thing is before you start investing in SEO, you also have to find out which platform most of your target audience is using. Let’s say for your business, your target audience is within the age group of 16 to 21. For this age group, they will spend most of their time on Instagram or TikTok. Your business should be investing more in social media marketing compared to SEO if your target audience is within this age range.
SEO Pricing in Malaysia Vs Overseas Providers
The SEO pricing in Malaysia and other countries are different. Based on our research that we include under types of SEO pricing which converted into MYR, you can see the standard worldwide SEO pricing range is much higher than in Malaysia. For example, famous SEO tool company like SEMRUSH offers SEO research tools ranging from USD 99 to USD 399 per month which not including any SEO activites yet. Other good example of famous SEO agency in US – HookAgency offer $3,800 per month just for Local SEO which is almost 3 to 4 times of SEO pricing for Local SEO in Malaysia.
There are some other companies that their SEO services locally charge $1,500 per month on average, which convert around MYR 6,450 just for Local SEO, while for the international SEO services, average charges about $3,600 per month which is around MYR 15,480.
Warning – Don’t Be Fooled by Cheap SEO Offers!
If you haven’t done your research, there are some agencies out there who are offering unbelievably cheap services. They may seem to save you money upfront, however, most of them will have zero results, or worse, damage your company’s reputation in the long run. If an seo agency offers ridiculously cheap prices for their services and claims to offer guaranteed-ranking, chances are they will be fulfilling their promises with black hat tactics. Those tactics will cause your site to be penalised by the search engine in the long run, as they seem to give a short run boost. You will eventually get back to your original state without traffics and ranking, and your business will be damaged after sales and leads go away. We have tons of clients that get to us with their website being penalized due to cheap SEO offers by some agency.
A good thumb of rule – check the SEO agency portfolio and their domain ranking, traffics and case studies before engage with them, as usual it is too good to be truth with a super cheap pricing!
Conclusion – Choosing The Right SEO Pricing For Your Business
To conclude everything, based on our research through SEO services offered in Malaysia, the SEO Cost In Malaysia starts at a minimum of RM800 per month.
The question that is commonly asked by most business owners is whether is it worth investing in SEO. Here’s what we think: It’s better to try out everything and see which method works best for your business.
Learn about SEO vs SEM – What Are The Differences?
SEO can be really beneficial to most businesses, which is why all businesses should work on their SEO. But the question lies in how much should you invest in SEO services because not every business gets its sales from search engines. Certain businesses gain better revenue on social media, for example. It all still depends on the factors stated above, so before you jump right into signing up for any SEO services, make sure you know what kind of SEO services you are looking for and why.
Once again, it also depends on the markets you want to reach whether it’s local or global, you can discuss and customize the package. Ranking on Google’s first page means your company is more accessible, making it easier for your target audience to search for you and meet you. Nexis Novus Technology on the other hand also offers comprehensive and customizable SEO pricing packages in Malaysia!