How much should we spend on SEO?

[thelimitlesscafe]

At the moment I'm writing a Advertising and Marketing Plan for our business; but as always its the Advertising and Marketing plan that needs the fullest attention in order to drive the sales; which in turn covers the overheads etc.

So how much should we spend on SEO, and how frequently would we need keep our attention towards SEO?

Any responses would be very much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Martin

[david64]

So how much should we spend on SEO

Don't know. You would need to give us much more detail to even be able to give you a ballpark figure. The main things we would need to know are:

1 - Is this going to be a new site?
2 - What keywords do you want to rank for?
3 - How keen are you for your SEO to strictly adhere to search engine guidelines?
4 - Do you want to outsource all your SEO work or do you want to do some in-house?

and how frequently would we need keep our attention towards SEO?

This will largely depend on points 2, 3 and 4.

If you are compeeting for competitive terms, you are probably going to have to be constantly working on building links. Also, SEO that adheres to Google's guidelines is in general much less prone to slip, but its also a lot more expensive. SEO that is really spammy can slip over time.


As a general though, I think most companies should have a budget of at least £1,000 for SEO no matter what the term is. If you haven't got that to budget it's probably not worth looking into.

[Place of design]

At the moment I'm writing a Advertising and Marketing Plan for our business; but as always its the Advertising and Marketing plan that needs the fullest attention in order to drive the sales; which in turn covers the overheads etc.

So how much should we spend on SEO, and how frequently would we need keep our attention towards SEO?

Any responses would be very much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Martin
We have a more analytical approach.
visitors X conversion X average order value = turnover

Without working on conversion (do a google seach for the industry norm, and dont be surprised if it is like 1-2%) you will find that

X amount of visitors will generate you Y amount of turnover

Drill that down to "Average expected contribution to turnover per visitor" (based on the industry norms for conversion in your sector)

At this point you will have a figure
example: each visitor is estimated to contribute £0.30

Now forgetting SEO for a miniute, go look at The adwords keyword calculator, and get up the suggested words for your sector.. You now will be able to begin to see if a adwords campaign is worth the money. If each click on average will cost you £1.00, you are stuffed. If each click on average will cost you £0.03 you may have found the way forwards

On top of that you will need SEO to ensure that you get "organic" placement in a search engine. I.e. where you position yourself, without the adwords

Depending on the competitivness of yoru sector, will depend on the balance you need to make between adwords and Organic SEO, However a well constructed site, with Good SEO ought not to need constant attention from the SEO guys, once the site has been initially sorted

The answer to your question is: Depends on your site size, the sector, the competition in the sector, and the qualitative desisions you make, once you find out how much "non organic" placement will cost you (i.e. Adwords, banner ads paid to other site owners etc.

[fisicx]

It's also worth considering that SEO won't directly earn you a penny, it's the site that makes the money, all SEO will do is make your site more visible in order to attract more visitors.

What you need to do is consider how to attract converting visitors to the site. If follows therefore that you will need to keep updating the site over a period of months (maybe even years) so that you keep imporving your conversions. This in turn will tighten your keywords so that you will rank for the bits that make you money rather than the bits you might like to be on page 1 for.

Consider as well that if your PPC campaigns are cheap you may not ever need to worry about a natural listing. But of course running PPC may mean dedicated PPC landing pages.

So to answer your question, it's not just SEO you need to budget for, you will need funds for PPC for anything up to a year and regular website updates.

This could be £10/month or £10,000/month depending on product and market.

[BigJunkTruck]

Spend as much as you can afford to lose on organic SEO and the rewards will be seen for years to come. A lot of SEOs are trying to jump on the social media bandwagon which will get you instant bursts of shorterm traffic which is often untargeted and hard to convert

[jayguy]

How many keyphrases are you wanting to be optimised for? How competitive are those phrases?

Are you planning to use an off-shore agency or domestic?

i can give you a rough idea what your SEO cost will be with answers to the above questions.

[ana1703]

Hi there,

SEO depends entirely on 2 important things. Firstly what is the optimisation status of your website currently, and secondly,how much are you willing to invest in SEO optimisation annually. I completely agree with David,that if all the prescribed norms and regulation of ethical SEO are carried out,1000 pounds should be the requisite amount. SEO is a one time investment that pays off at later stages.Moreover just getting SEO done is not enough.You need to maintain the ranking of your website by utilising the SEO maintenance services also. As there are various companies getting SEO done for their websites and vying for your position.And moreover when the SEO is done the charges for maintenance are very pocket friendly.
Hope I answered your query!!!