Acronyms come and go, but SEO is here to stay. Search Engine Optimization is an asset that every business needs in a world where all potential customers are online. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to properly use it, even when they have a large budget for it.
Many people who are just starting out in marketing wonder if they should pay for clicks by hiring an outside company. Some people worry whether they can do search engine optimization (SEO) in-house, which would save them a lot of money. All of these concerns are valid. We want you to know that you are not alone.
Some best practices can help you make the most of your SEO budget and improve your business. Read on to find out how you can maximize the impacts of your SEO budget and change the way you do business.
This is my step-by-step process for building an SEO budget:
1. Understand the business model
The business model explains which projects will be funded and which ones won’t. The business model also dictates which direction the organization will go in.
You can build your SEO budget strategically to align with your company’s business model by understanding it deeply.
If you want to operate at an executive level in an enterprise company, you have to get below the surface. You can do this by finding the answers to these questions:
- How do customers behave? How do they find us? What do they click on?
- What percentage of revenue comes from each business unit?
- What revenue metrics are we reporting on (LTV, CAC, margin, etc.)?
The foundation of your SEO strategy will be dictated by the business model you choose.
2. Correlate SEO to revenue
It is difficult for SEO professionals to connect revenue to SEO, especially if analytics are not working correctly.
I frequently have people ask me, “If we improve our page speed score by 10 points, will that result in more revenue?” It’s a stretch to think that there would be a direct connection between the two, but we have to try to establish some sort of correlation.
We can go through another example to better understand. I was working on a budget request for more writers for a real estate company.
Here is how I turned hypotheticals into ROI:
We could potentially make $2,910,000 from the blog each month, with an ROI of 93%. This is based on the assumptions provided below.
- 160 hours per month for [LIST TEAM MEMBERS] to manage the blog (80 hours per person per month)
- $23,720 per month in labor costs to manage the blog
- $18,720 per month for [LIST TEAM MEMBERS] to manage the blog ($117 per hour)
- $5,000 per month for freelance writers (this is our current budget for the 20 blogs we are producing today)
- $5,000 additional cost per month for new freelance writers)
- $500 per month in technology costs (hosting, maintenance plugins, Semrush, etc.). This is a guesstimate.
It costs us $29,220 per month to manage the blog. This includes things like web hosting, software, design, and promotions.
If 30 people visit the blog each month and sign up, then _____.
The value of a $3,300 transaction increases to $121,250 when taking into account future transactions from the same family.
But we know that we spend $29,220 on our company blog each month, which is about 24% of the $121,250 we spend on expenses each month. So that leaves us with $92,030.
Let’s assume that the customer lifetime value for the blog is $92,030.
If we were to get 30 signups from the blog each month, we would generate $2,760,900 per month.
The ROI of our blogging program is 93% every month.
Once more, this isn’t required to be precise. These are only presumptions founded on the information.
3. Consider investing in linkable content
While having linkable assets is definitely a valuable part of content marketing, it’s also important to have backlinks from other websites since this can positively impact your Google ranking.
Having backlinks from reputable websites is valuable to Google’s algorithm because it is seen as a vote of confidence. This plays an important role in how website are ranked.
If you want to get the most out of your SEO budget, try to find ways to get links from trusted websites. This can be difficult at first, as you may need to pay for links. However, there are some alternatives that can help you boost your link profile without spending a lot of money.
4. Submit your sitemap
An alternative strategy is to post your material to business directories such as Facebook, Yahoo, or Bing. By doing this, you can figuratively put your business on the map. These directories can help improve your ranking in a specific geographical area or niche market. This is possible because it becomes easier for you to beat other competitors.
If you’re looking to get a boost, it’s better to focus on quality and relevance rather than quantity. A 500-1000 word article is more likely to get you better results.
If you want to use links to improve your SEO, don’t forget to promote your business’s unique selling points. Make sure you always present your best side, as there are things that you can offer audiences that no one else can. And don’t be afraid to contact popular websites; they’re always looking for new, interesting content to keep their readers engaged.
5. Repurpose good content on your site
If you are aware of your strong points, you can use them to your advantage. This is especially true in SEO marketing, where the saying goes ‘Get more out of what you already own!’. If you are facing a tight SEO budget, a good way to make do is to recycle and improve your content.
Every company owns some type of content, whether in website blogs or practice area pages, that underwent careful review and study. This content is important to the business because it covers the most important themes and audience areas. When you want to save time and money, repurposing this content is a good idea. However, don’t just copy and paste the content. This would be lazy and inefficient.
How to rework your content
Some ways to get more from your existing content include:
- Updating content: Some content is evergreen, but sometimes, new developments, market changes, or technologies demand changes. Take an old blog and refurbish it by adding new content that is relevant to current audiences. Such solutions add new life to the article and benefit from the quality of thematic areas that the original used.
- Play around with the format: All work no play is the worst decision you can make in SEO or content marketing. Many platforms support multimedia content today. So, instead of relying on the old text-only approach, be diverse. You can turn an old, detailed article into a slide presentation, add an infographic, make a simple video, and blend it in with some light text. These strategies can make content more interesting to readers as they can be engaged on multiple levels.
- Use feedback as a prompt: Sometimes, your customer feedback can be the key you need for fresh content. When you check your FAQs or query sections, you’ll notice your support staff replying to some important questions. The content is valuable since it narrows down the need for extensive research on what customers need to read more about. But, as you repurpose such content, take care not to reveal personal or sensitive information.
- Write less: The idea here is that you don’t have to keep churning out new content to see results. Churning out new content is important, but it can also be frustrating and time-consuming. Finding innovative ways of making your content visible to customers is more valuable.
- Promote more: Keep promoting your most popular work and—this is crucial—constantly be thinking about new and alternative ways of getting it in front of relevant audiences. Try social media, email, or video sharing sites as avenues of blasting your best content for audiences to consume.
6. Learn who your competitors are
It’s all about staying ahead of the competition in niche markets when it comes to market domination. By conducting a competitor analysis, you can discover who your rivals are, their size, and response strategies. Checking out your competition also reveals your flaws and highlights areas where you can build strength.
A competitor analysis can help you identify areas where your SEO growth is lagging and help you to close the gap.
7. Update your site with quality and relevant content
When SEO began, businesses were focused on including target keywords in order to impress the Google crawlers. However, after the continued abuse or misuse of the search engine algorithms, the focus shifted to more than just keywords.
The SEO techniques used today understand that filling a page with nothing but keywords is not effective. The Google algorithm, which is responsible for ranking web pages, is now set up to give preferential treatment to pages with high-quality content.
What is quality content?
Since Google’s bots are trained to think like a human, they consider content to be good or quality if it is accurate, engaging, easy to read, and relevant to the user’s query.
Other dimensions of quality content include:
- Lack of grammatical errors
- Originality
- No or limited duplicates
- Good arrangement and explanations
Quality content is also great for social media. Quality content on a business website is important because it leads to conversions. When customers visit a site and find the information they need, they trust the website to sell them the product or service. So, while rankings on the SERP are important, companies need to convert visitors into customers. Other benefits of quality content are that if the content is useful, others will share it, and this is how you build links. Quality content is also great for social media.
This is because content that is useful and well-made is always in demand by both websites and visitors. If they find it useful, they are more likely to share it.
8. Compare your SEO budget to your PPC budget
If 56% of the marketing budget is dedicated to online channels, then those channels will have to compete against each other for a portion of the budget.
In the same Gartner report, CMOs shared how the online channel marketing budget gets allocated:
- 10.1% to social advertising
- 9.8% to search advertising
- 9.3% to digital display advertising
- 8.8% to digital video advertising
- 8.1% to partners
- 8.1% to digital audio advertising
- 8.5% to SEO
- 7.8% to content and messaging
It’s surprising that only 8.5% of the marketing budget for online channels is being allocated to SEO when 56% of the overall marketing budget is for online channels.
Then you need to determine what percentage of your SEO budget goes to technical aspects, content, and link building.
Understand the marketing budget so you have an idea of what budget to go for.
9. Embrace the suck of enterprise SEO budgets
Proving the return on investment for SEO may seem like a pointless, unuseful, tedious task made up of lies.
But as SEO professionals, we must embrace the suck.
Although it may appear to be false to you, it could be interpreted as a warning sign by your CMO or CEO. If you communicate using business language, you will be speaking the language of your executives.
It’s time for SEO professionals to start talking about revenue instead of traffic and pageviews.
Budget spreadsheets aren’t sexy. But assumptions are free.
It’s not about having an exact scientific method, it’s about giving you something to connect with the people in charge.
I assess the current level of traffic and estimate the likely increase in traffic based on planned activities. I compare this to the existing conversion rate to estimate the likely increase in conversions. I then calculate the potential financial gain from these conversions, taking into account the revenue or other value generated by the conversions.
I’d like to suggest that we increase our monthly active users by 20%. This would allow us to reach our goal of $ZZZ, based on the lifetime value or first-time purchase value of a user. It would cost us $Y to achieve this over the next ABC time frame.
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