More and more people become connected to the internet every day, and with 87% of all Americans using the web, it should be easy to see why digital marketing is a big deal. The way that we use the web typically is that we head to a search engine and use that to find the pages that we are looking for. As a result, it would be incredibly beneficial if you could appear at the top of the search results for queries that are relevant to your business.
To achieve this, you need SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. Typically SEO involves optimizing your website so that it is crawled more favorably by search engines, as well as doing external marketing to get more websites to link to your site. But how much should we pay for SEO?
SEO Can Increase Your Revenue
Unlike many of the other expenses that your company has, SEO has the potential to directly impact your revenue in a significant way. Many local and national businesses rely almost exclusively on SEO to generate them tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit each month.
By ranking towards the top of the search results for queries that are relevant to your business you can increase your click through rate and therefore get more people onto your website. From there you can sell to them and increase your revenue. With that in mind, it’s important to recognize that the more you spend on SEO, typically the more you will get in return.
As a result, it’s often better to think of SEO as an investment in your sales and marketing rather than as an expense in the same way that your rent or insurance is an expense. By doing this, you can get into the mindset that is required to be successful, rather than being fearful about spending your hard earned cash on marketing.
Do You Have Enough Money in Your Budget?
Before you can decide how much should we pay for SEO, you need to figure out if you can afford it. While you can do SEO with any budget, the large majority of agencies won’t work with you unless you have between $500 and $1,000 to spend each month. The reason for this is because below this level it’s hard to get much traction and see consistent improvements.
SEO isn’t an overnight change in the same way that PPC might be, which is why it’s important to budget for at least three months and possibly up to six before expecting a huge change in your revenue. Therefore, you should be able to budget $1,500 to $6,000 at the least.
How Much SEO Have You Done Before?
The amount of SEO that you have done before will have a huge impact on how much should we pay for SEO because if you’re starting from scratch, it’s going to take far longer to see results. Whereas once you’re already moving along, you can see a much faster response to changes and improvements that we make.
If you’ve never done any search engine optimization of any kind, you’ll want to budget a larger amount. Otherwise, you’ll need to be more patient and wait for months to see a large uptick in traffic.
What Existing Resources Do You Have
One of the most important components of any search engine optimization strategy will be content. You need content to have pages to rank in Google for keywords, and you need content to use for building links to your site which can help your pages to rank higher in the results pages.
If you’re starting from zero, you can budget more, to begin with, to get a head start, or you can continue with an average budget and move at a slightly slower rate. Whereas if your website is already packed with valuable content, blog posts and service pages it’s far easier for us to come in and make a large impact even in the first month.
Your Budget Should Reflect Your Goals
The amount that you choose to spend on SEO should directly reflect the goals that you have for your company. If you don’t want to grow too quickly, you might choose to only spend a few thousand dollars each month on search engine optimization while businesses looking for rocket-ship growth might spend ten thousand each month or more.
SEO is incredibly time-intensive, and therefore the amount that you spend is directly correlated to your results because your budget will allow for more people hours to be spent on your site. Remember, you can often increase or decrease your budget as you go and therefore you might choose to start with a larger budget, to begin with, so that you can get early traction.
Typical Spend for Small and Medium Companies
According to a survey from SemRush, 31.15% of agencies have a monthly minimum of $1000, which was the most popular answer to their questionnaire. Going off this data and what we know about the industry, this suggests that the typical spend of small and medium companies is around $4,000 to $6,000 per month.
Again, you can spend far less than this and still get great results, especially if you’re in a less competitive industry and if you want to you can also budget far more than this. The amount that you will need to spend is highly specific to your business, and for this reason, it’s best to get in contact with us and get a quote that is custom to your business.
