Are you trying to figure out how much money your business should spend on a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign?
There are no easy guarantees for fast first-page results. Good SEO takes patience and your business goals should determine the right budget.
Survey shows that only about half of small businesses allot a budget for SEO. For the the half that do, 71 percent are willing to spend up to $100 USD only on their SEO. That’s right. Spammers know it and this is where low-cost SEO guarantees convenitly priced at $99 USD come from. Businesses spend less than $100 USD on SEO services per month when they really should be spending significantly more to get the desired results.
SEO is fast-changing. Google, for instance likes to keep us by surprise when it comes to their algorithm. Certain guidelines (like Google Webmaster Guidelines) remain fixed and must be followed, but what makes your SEO campaign successful today will not guarantee that you will rank high in the next few weeks or months. Given this, you should know that it is not possible to get a fixed quotation from SEO companies. Throw in the fact that different business, industries and service models have different needs requirements and competitive elements.
If $100 USD per month is not enough, then how much should you really be spending?
The best way you can determine your budget for SEO is to define your desired outcome from a campaign and your measure for success.
What are your reasons for investing in SEO? Is it to get more traffic on your website? Is it to get more viewers for your content? Is it a high keyword and results page ranking? Also, how will you determine if a campaign is successful? Is it successful if you get a high ranking on a SERP? Is it successful if you get more customers? Do you want to measure your success in terms of revenue or return on investment (ROI)?
Once you define the answers, you will know how to position your business in the market. It can give you insights on how to stand out from your competitors because you are clear on what you want to achieve. It will also give the SEO company you hire for your campaign insights on what you need. From here, you can work on a budget.
SEO can be overwhelming but as long as you pay attention to these three vital SEO factors, you are well on your way to a successful campaign – crawlability, content, and backlinking.
How do you upgrade or fix Crawlability?
Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to access and index content on your website. By hiring a web agency or web developer to do a website audit and improve your site’s technical SEO you can ensure you have a benchmark for improvements as well as know if you have the best foundations for the next steps.
Cost: A website audit report may cost you $100-$800 USD. This is a report that tells you in detail what’s wrong with your website and the steps you can do to fix it. At 1768degrees.com we offer free overview website audits or more comprehensive audits for free if then signing up to our Technical SEO fixes. We believe SEO is the way forward and want to remove the upfront barriers to your sites progression up the search results.
Surveys show Technical SEO fixes may range from $1,000-$8,000. USD This will vary on how big your site is, how many pages it has or if you really need a total website overhaul. We will quote based on the amount of work that the Technical SEO report uncovers. If your site is healthy and good to go then the cost for technical SEO can be very minimal. This is why we recommend – Free overview Audit – this gives an overview picture of the challenges your site is experiencing. If this uncovers any red flags then a full technical report is the way to go. This ensures you can measure the work undertaken by your chosen SEO specialists and is something they will need to undertake so they aren’t blindly fumbling in the dark.
How do you improve Content?
A web agency or a copywriter can help improve your site’s content. By coming up with a content calendar, and keyword-targeted content creation. There are a lot of websites with brand new and unique content being published on peak user hours. By doing the same for your brand, creating readership engagement and positioning it as a content authority will give your website that competitive edge.
Cost: Content can be priced per service, initial consultation fees plus number of articles needed. It can start as low as $25 to $500 or even beyond $2,500-$3,500 USD. Consider the scale of your needs, some websites choose to go beyond article campaigns and go to offer ebooks and whitepapers with pages stretching to the hundreds. Here at 1768degrees.com we offer content creation (starting with a white sheet of paper), content rewrite (getting your website content written for customers and Google), Article creation (typically 1000 words), short blogs up to 300 words as well as customised quotes for work.
How do you get Backlinks?
Backlinking means acquiring a hyperlink from a website usually a website more popular and higher site than your own. It may just cost you time, if you toil on the social engineering aspect of backlinking, such as networking with other websites and getting them to like you, online or in real life. Some would rather buy backlinks based on quality metrics, though this is not exactly legit, it does happen.
Cost: A backlink purchase may cost you around $20-$500 USD.
We don’t at 1768degrees.com recommend buying back links for any reason. Rather we recommend joining your local chamber of commerce which is an accepted credible site as well as giving you real life networking opportunities. Back linking will occur as you create more content and sites link to yours as well as you within your content linking to relevant sources of information, in the hope they will recognise your content.
It is important to note that an SEO campaign will rarely yield results overnight. SEO is about the long game. It may take months to establish your web presence on the internet, from Google submission through to indexing, tracking the data alone requires a lot of patience. No need to rush in with cheap SEO tactics that may tarnish your credibility or worse, lead to search engine penalties. For more on this read our Black Hat / White Hat SEO article.
Given these factors, you have to determine your business goals, metrics for success, position, timeframe, and choose the SEO company you will hire for the work. Ideally, allot a budget that you can afford consistently for up to 12 months. SEO is not a one-time investment. The work SEO companies will do for you is consistently the same, but the volume of work differs according to your budget. This means the more money you invest in SEO, the faster the results will be.
