It’s difficult to quantify how much money your company should invest in SEO. It doesn’t help that there is never a guaranteed return on your marketing investments; you are effectively taking a chance, no matter how carefully you may have calculated it.
The key is to carefully establish a balance with your SEO budget; it must be sizable enough to provide results while remaining manageable for your company’s finances. Here are a few simple actions you may take to allocate this funding wisely.
Consider Your Business’s Entire Budget.
Setting a budget for SEO can seem like slicing a cake. In the beginning, you will have a finished cake, which we will refer to as your company’s total marketing budget.
Naturally, a portion of that cake will have to be forfeited due to daily overhead costs that your organization must deal with. This cake can become even more scarce if you struggle to maintain the excellent quality and accessibility of your business’s goods or services.
However, the amount of the cake slice you must spare for your marketing may be larger than you had initially thought based on what goods or services your business offers and to what kind of audience.
If the majority of your business is conducted online, budget extra for SEO.
Whether your company generates the majority of its revenue online or through a physical location, investing in digital marketing can still be quite beneficial.
Your business strategy should, however, nonetheless guide the precise allocation of your marketing budget between SEO and other promotional activities.
Think About Your Entire Marketing Goals.
Whatever they may be, you should consider how SEO could assist you in achieving them.
For instance, you could attempt to develop an SEO strategy that would draw the volume of organic traffic required for you to reach this certain milestone if you were aiming to generate a certain number of leads or sales.
However, if your goal is to use SEO to increase brand recognition, you might have a less clear idea of how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to SEO. This situation serves as an example of why you should, wherever and whenever possible.
Set Up the Success Metrics You Will Use
This means, when setting your SEO goals, decide how you will measure the progress you are making towards those goals.
You should probably pay the most attention to metrics that directly impact your bottom line, like conversions and revenue. With the goal itself, you should be specific, such as “increase sales by 2% per month”.
However, you should also keep in mind that SEO won’t work overnight. Google explained in a YouTube video that “in most cases, SEO takes four months to a year to help your business implement improvements first and then see potential benefits.”
Follow Your Competitors
If you’re reading this article at the beginning, your competitors may have been in the SEO game longer than you.
If this is indeed the case, these rival companies may also rank well on Google for many of the keywords your target customers will tend to type in the search box.
So it will be interesting if you study how your search engine ranking actually compares with the ratings of other companies. Remember that what you have to spend to catch them in the SEO field can be much less than the cost of losing customers to these companies.
Consider Moving More Spend from PPC to SEO
It is understandable to want to pay more for PPC advertising than SEO, at least in the beginning. After all, with PPC, there’s not so much “fear of the unknown” regarding when and where your site will appear on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
However, in a study highlighted by Search Engine Land, it was found that organic search attracted 53% of total website traffic, while paid search rates were around 15%.
If your own data shows that SEO is superior to PPC at attracting high-quality visitors to your site, then you may want to reallocate your marketing spend accordingly.
Our Lagos SEO consultant can help you use SEO in a particularly effective combination with PPC advertising; Please call us on +2348138950213 for more information on this or schedule a discovery call here.
