Most people think of SEO as an expensive digital marketing solution and indeed, search engine optimization can be costly if not effectively planned. Running an SEO campaign will require you to be diligent in order to attain the desired results. Above all, you must exercise patience.
If you want to benefit from an SEO campaign, you must understand how to create an SEO marketing strategy and decide how much you are willing to spend. You must have well-defined goals because many SEO campaigns are usually paused or terminated due to several factors like cost and the length of time it takes to realize goals.
So, you may ask yourself, how do I develop a budget for my SEO campaign?
Understanding what to spend on and how much to spend can help businesses fetch sizeable results from SEO campaigns. With that, we would like to look at several considerations when formulating a budget for your SEO campaign.
Formulating a Budget for an SEO Campaign
It should be noted that there is no clear-cut path to formulating a budget for an SEO campaign because SEO strategies greatly differ. Also, goals may differ from one business to another. However, there are several factors that can help determine the budget of an SEO campaign, and these include;
- Planning
SEO is a big step for many businesses because it requires diligence and a range of resources to attain results. Also, the nature of the results and the time it takes to attain results differ greatly.
With that, running an SEO campaign will require you to assess your technical SEO performance, overall website, and the formerly implemented strategies. You will have to ditch the non-performing SEO practices and update your SEO knowledge.
Also, you must set realistic goals depending on your SEO investment.
- In-house Resources or Hiring.
SEO campaigns can be run by an in-house team or a digital marketing agency and in fact, 40% of small businessesleverage in-house SEO tools to run their campaigns. Running an SEO campaign with an in-house team is relatively cheap and considerable as long as a business follows the best SEO practices. This is highly recommendable if you’re a startup or a small business without huge funds.
However, hiring an SEO agency to run an SEO campaign is also a profitable medium, especially when running multiple digital marketing campaigns. For example, a retail business that desires to increase conversions and sales via website development or optimization and Google Ads.
An in-house team may not have the necessary expertise to run a complex SEO strategy, especially if you’re a medium or enterprise-level company. Therefore, perform a SWOT analysis to assess your in-house SEO prowess and that of an SEO agency. Hiring SEO services will cost you more, however, you will be able to fetch a higher ROI.
- Website Development or Redesign?
Are you embarking on online retail for the first time or you have been selling online for some time? Whether you want to invest in local SEO, Google My Business, or want to run an SEO campaign, your website matters a lot. A website is your official online identity and its traits matter a lot.
Commonly, the major purpose of running an SEO campaign is to increase traffic to a website, leads, conversions, or sales. A functional website characterized by a good load speed, high-quality content, and mobile-friendliness can help a business attain incredible results.
With that, developing a website from scratch or redesigning a site will require additional costs which obviously increase your SEO budget. A high-performing website is key to fetching long-term SEO results and with that, you should assess whether you require website development or a redesign.
- Do You Need Technical SEO?
Technical SEO can’t be taken out of the equation when running an SEO campaign. In fact, running an SEO-optimized campaign will require an SEO team to look at several elements like website speed, data markup, SSL, coding, etc.
Technical SEO focuses on the back-end aspect of a website that includes site and server optimization. These allow search engines to easily crawl and index a website in order to improve traffic.
Including technical SEO in the picture can help a site meet search engine algorithms criteria. Also, this will require top expertise, especially when running a complex website and this can increase your SEO budget.
- Components of Your SEO Campaign
A full-fledged SEO campaign will consist of on-page and off-page SEO practices whether you want to increase sales or grow your online business. On-page SEO involves tactics that optimize web pages for organic traffic. There are many of them and these include optimizing HTML tags, images, and headlines. It is also quite important to create high-quality content based on user intent and business goals. Keyword research and competitor research are also crucial.
On the other hand, off-page SEO practices allow a business to improve its site’s search engine rankings. Here we find several practices like blogging, link building, internal linking, social media marketing, and PPC including social media ads.
Understanding the performance of an SEO campaign in this case will require an SEO professional to set marketing KPIs. These metrics i.e website bounce rate, keyword ranking, and average session duration can allow an SEO professional to monitor the progress of an SEO campaign.
Including pay-per-click solutions will automatically increase your SEO budget because there is a direct charge for each click or impression.
Developing an SEO Budget
Formulating an SEO budget will totally depend on your SEO needs and business goals. It should also be noted that SEO budgets differ from one company to another. Some businesses may want to invest in short-term SEO campaigns before running a long-term SEO campaign.
All this influences an SEO budget. Also, there are many facets of SEO that must be considered as detailed above. Other facts like the SEO service provider, the location, and other requirements like A/B testing and AI implementation can increase an SEO budget.
Therefore, understand the necessary facets of your SEO campaign and also consider a SWOT analysis and a competitor analysis to run a cost-effective and reliable SEO campaign. Also, remember that SEO is associated with an array of long-term benefits.
Your SEO campaign may require a huge investment in the start, but the benefits are worth your every input.