Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / Start here
What does SEO work actually involve, and can you pay Google to rank higher?
Summary
You can't. Google says it doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher, and that ranking is done programmatically. SEO is the work of making your pages easy for Google to find, understand and show to someone searching, and SEO tools only help you measure and diagnose that work; none of them can buy a position. Changes can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to show up.
Three stages, and a page can stall at any of them
Google breaks Search into crawling, indexing and serving results. Crawlers download text, images and video from pages Google has found. Indexing is where Google analyzes that content and stores it. Serving is what happens when someone searches: Google returns what it judges relevant to the query.
Not every page makes it through all three. Google is explicit that it doesn't guarantee to crawl, index or serve a page, even one that follows its Search Essentials.
Most new pages are found through links from pages Google already knows. You can also submit a sitemap, a list of your URLs, but Google describes it as optional.
Where the work goes depends on where the page stalls
If Google hasn't found a page, the fix is usually a link to it from somewhere else on your site. If it's been crawled but not indexed, you look at the page itself and its settings. If it's indexed but barely shows up, the question becomes whether it answers what people are actually searching for.
Google's own starter guide opens by saying there are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first. That line and the no-payment policy apply to organic results; ads are a separate system.
What a tool adds
Search Console is free and shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for your own site, with the last three months on screen by default. For many small sites, that answers the first question: which pages show up, and for which searches.
Paid tools add what Search Console can't see. They research other people's sites, record rankings for a keyword list on a schedule, and crawl your whole site for technical problems. Their traffic and search volume figures for other sites are the vendor's own estimates, not Google's records, which is why two tools rarely agree.
How long before anything changes
Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether your work helped. The newest numbers in Search Console are also preliminary and can shift over the following hours. A fix made yesterday won't tell you much in this morning's report.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.