How Much Budget Should I Dedicate to SEO?
You should anticipate setting a budget anywhere from $5,000.00 to $10,000+ a month, depending on the total amount of available capital. The more you can dedicate to improving your online visibility, the faster you can expect to see results. Your SEO should be part of your overall digital marketing efforts, so balancing SEO with the rest of your marketing plan is essential. Regardless of strategy or budget, SEO takes time.
SEO is only one part of digital marketing. Knowing how much of your budget to dedicate to SEO lies in understanding your goals and your current progress toward those goals. Answering these questions can help you determine how much of the budget you can or should allocate:
- How long has your company had an online presence?
- How much organic search traffic do you get now?
- Are you on the first page of Google for any search terms? If so, what tactics got you there?
- How much competition is there for keywords in your industry?
- What do you think your competitors are spending on their SEO efforts?
How much should you budget for SEO? Budgeting for SEO is a million-dollar question for many businesses – and unfortunately, there’s no clear-cut answer. What works for your business likely isn’t going to work for the next one. Even if two directly competing companies have the same budget, they can get different results based on who they hire and how they allocate their funds.
Look at Your Total Budget
Every year, you should look at the amount of money you have coming into your business and how much profit margin you can put back into your business to keep it growing. If this is your first year in business, creating a budget should be a priority, but leaving some breathing room to make adjustments as needed is essential.
Start with how much revenue you have for your total budget. Factor in the products or services you provide and if they target a specific business service or a consumer audience. Then, consider the percentage of revenue generated online and how many of your internal staff members are on your marketing team.
The more significant the portion of revenue that comes from online sources, the larger your digital marketing budget should be, as that will help increase online sales.
How Much of the Budget Can You Afford to Dedicate to Your Digital Marketing?
Running a business is expensive, and there are many costs to consider. After you look at the expenses you have to pay outside of digital marketing, what do you have left over? Remember, it’s not necessarily about how much you have available but how well you use it.
Are You Just Starting?
As a new business, you’ll need to dedicate a more substantial portion of your SEO budget to content creation so you can lay the groundwork for the search engines to find the content to rank. And, of course, because you have other SEO tasks to take care of, more of your overall digital marketing budget needs to go to SEO.
Have You Been Around Awhile?
If you’ve had an online presence for a while, you may have good ranks established with your content, but technical errors on the website structure could negatively affect your SEO efforts. Just because you have a good ranking doesn’t mean you can spend less on SEO or, worse, afford to ignore it.
How Much Should You Pay for SEO Services?
Here comes the tricky part: this can easily make or break your budget. Spending money with a sub-par agency to get a good deal, or because it’s something you can afford more of, could harm your progress more than spending more money with a quality agency, even if it means getting less of their services overall.
Options include:
● Hiring an in-house SEO specialist or team – bear in mind it’s possible you won’t have enough work to keep them busy year-round, which could impact morale and productivity.
● Hiring an independent SEO consultant is essentially a freelancer with a background in SEO. If you take this route, expect to pay anywhere from $80 to $190 an hour, depending on experience. It’s best to take this route only if you have a marketing team on staff that can manage everything.
● How to hire an SEO agency. For most businesses, it makes sense to hire an agency since the work is highly specialized. With an agency, expect to pay anywhere from $150 to $250 an hour, depending on the agency’s billable rate.
SEO Inc.’s award-winning SEO Services ensures you have a team of experienced professionals working to help your business grow. We work with companies of all sizes and are willing to develop a plan for you that works for your available budget. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
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