If you are a business owner or a marketing manager, you are probably asking yourself how much you should spend on SEO services.

This article will help you get the answer to that question.

Your SEO expectations

A recent survey made by Search Engine Journal - a blog about everything SEO and search engine marketing, states that less than 50% of all small businesses owners have budgeted any money for SEO services. For other small businesses that are investing in SEO services, they average just under $500/month. The good news is that SEO service is one of those expertise where you actually do get what you pay for.

According to Search Engine Journal’s survey, businesses spending more than $500/month on SEO services are 53.3% more likely to be “extremely satisfied” with the results.

So, knowing that most business owners and marketing managers investing in SEO Services see so much ROI, why do so many of them resist investing in SEO? 

The answer is quite simple: In my 20+ years of digital marketing experience, most business owners have no clue how search engine marketing works. 

Those people, (maybe you?) are far too busy running their businesses to spend time learning how SEO works and how they can apply it to grow sales.

Unlike landscaping or building maintenance, SEO is not a commodity service that you pay X price to get Y result. There is no guarantee that your website will be on page 1 of the SERP (Search Result Page) if you pay 199$ per month. Be careful to not fall for the $49/month “guaranteed page one” scammer ads you see on Facebook.

The real question is: What is the cost of a cheap SEO Service?

I've been a member of various internet marketing, freelancers and business owners groups on Facebook for as long as Facebook groups have existed and let me say this: I often come across some truly mind-boggling posts by digital marketing ‘’newbies’’ posing as ‘’SEO experts’’ who have no clue what they are talking about.

One of the scariest questions asked by those so-called SEO gurus usually reads like this: “I just signed a client for SEO, where do I start? 

It freaks me out to know that this dude will get a paycheck for doing something he is not well versed in. I mean, SEO is an investment. Would you let anybody play around with your stocks?



A close second is the use of shady manipulating link practices without explaining the risk to their clients.It’s bad enough that business owners or marketing managers waste money hiring unskilled SEO strategists.

Unfortunately, problems arising from bad SEO can be damaging to your business in the long term.

Here is an example: bad, chady or even blackhat SEO practices will eventually lead to Google penalties, which might make your website disappear not only from SERP, but it might also wipe out all your business links from appearing in search. Ouch!

So, before entering into an agreement with an SEO strategist, it’s better to discuss the tactics he will be employing. 

You should also educate yourself on the basics of SEO to be able to understand the mechanics of SEO and be able to communicate and confirm your expectations. 

Here is what you should know prior to hiring an SEO strategist in order to understand what their scope of work will be.

What are your resources?

The amount of Google ranking factors - more than 200 - might overwhelm you. Here’s what you need to know about how SEO works and what an experienced SEO specialist should be looking at.

1. The Architecture of the information of your website

Your website should:

• Be accessible to Search Engine bots who are fetching the web by crawling websites and pages
• Follow SEO best practices as prescribed by Google
• Offer the best UX (User Experience)
• Be optimized with the essential metrics in place (Core Web Vitals)
• Have a clean rendering on any type of devices and screen size
  

2. Your website’s content

Your website’s content should be built and managed within Google's best practices such as:

• Match user intent: what will the users do when they acknowledge your content?
• Have unique content
• Have content that matches search queries - question people have on certain topics relating to your products and services
• Provide frequent, new content according to Google’s best practice.

3. Links pointing to your pages

• Links must be naturally pointing to your website. For example, a well-known food blogger has an article about some of your products he uses in his recipes and links some keywords to a page on your website that presents and explains the benefits of your product. 
• Avoid popular link schemes or paid link services. They just don’t work and will hurt your SEO.

Set realistic business goals

Before thinking about an SEO budget, you must define realistic business goals. 

These goals should include a timeframe, and a conversion goal in order to measure success. For example, website visits, inbound leads from forms, subscribers, questions from visitors via your chat app, meeting or callback requests, inbound phone calls and ultimately, sales. 

Some people measure success solely by keyword rankings. I don’t. While SERP remains an important metric, it is not THE most important metric. I prefer to measure conversion, how many visits have turned into paying clients, which is much more relevant from a business point of view.

An example of goal-setting could include improving organic sessions by X%, increasing conversions by Y per month and/or increasing revenues by Z%.

You need to give any SEO campaign the time to work. If anybody offers to rank every page of your website in a week, run!

According to Google, ‘’…in most cases, SEOs requires four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.”

You can check out this video bout how to hire a Search Engine Optimizer here: https://youtu.be/piSvFxV_M04



So, what about that budget for SEO?

The goals your SEO strategists will help you set will determine what tactics are needed to achieve them. This, in turn, sets the table for developing an SEO action plan and determines how much time and effort is necessary to support that plan.

Most of the time, if a client has a full web ecosystem in place,  I propose to make an SEO audit of that ecosystem to figure out the starting point of a project.

Sometimes, web pages can rank very well for some keywords that are not going to help a business achieve its goals. So it's vital to have a clear picture of the SEO situation to start with in order to hit bullseye with the new strategy.

An SEO audit will consider the information architecture of your website, your content strategy and backlink check and how your web ecosystem performs against your closest competitors.

The answers to the questions I will ask myself during the SEO audit will determine priorities as well as the volume of work needed to reach your goals.

In most cases, the work required will be the same but more aggressive goals will increase the volume of work that needs to be done to reach those goals. 

For example, if the SEO strategy implies that we’re creating, optimizing and publishing two new blog posts per week, you have a higher potential achieving earlier success but it will require a higher budget to produce and subsequently distribute that content.

According to SEMRush, a well executed SEO strategy might take up to 12 months to deliver results. 

In order to properly evaluate the performance of an SEO campaign, It takes time to properly plan it, deploy it and adjust it. 

Keep in mind that the bigger the budget, the faster you will reach your goals.

So: How much can you expect to spend on SEO?

Personally, I have more than 20 years of experience building and optimizing websites. I have a proven track record and I’ve helped hundreds of businesses thrive with what I do so you can expect to invest a minimum of $500 per month if you own a local business or have an ecommerce business that makes sales locally.

Depending on your market, a national or international SEO campaign will require a minimum budget of $2,500 to $5,000 per month to deliver results.

If you can’t afford to retain a top-level SEO pro (like myself), there are some options. 

I offer to do a one-time website SEO audit with actionable recommendations.I will make a video or live presentation so you can ask me questions. You can then perform the implementations yourself or hire a webmaster to do the work.

Sometimes, we can achieve good results in organic search results just by tweaking a few things on a website. 

For example, optimizing titles and descriptions of products in a Shopify store can help a page rank better for the chosen keywords, boost traffic on that page and get more conversions.

Also, content creations and keyword analysis are other services where you can get help from a professional copywriter, blogger or search marketing specialist for a one-time fixed rate.

Another option is to become an expert and do it yourself. But be prepared to invest around 10,000 hours of studying, trial and error. 

Remember: SEO is a long term investment!

Any organic search campaign is always a long shot strategy and will take time to deliver results. A complete SEO campaign is a combination of content marketing, link-building and technical SEO.

The Google algorithm needs time to deliver results even when it's planned and executed with best practices, so get ready to invest for the long term.

That being said, in most cases, the results earned from a good SEO strategy is usually the most consistent and effective strategy of most marketing tactics.

Would you like to know more about how we can help your business have more visibility in Google? Schedule a discovery meeting, drop us a line or call us today.