SEO Budgets, the million dollar question???
-
Hi All,
I am currently looking to revamp my SEO strategy inline with Google's latest Panda and Penguin updates, and looking to appoint a new agency.
With SEO changing so much over the years and so many players in the marketplace quoting all sorts, I simply need to determine
- the kind of money I need to be spending on my SEO,
2) what i should be getting for the money, or different budget levels
-
what I need to be focusing on in priority order, a top ten in sorts
-
Should i be looking to increase or decrease my spend over the long term.
I am only a small business with a turnover of about 50 - 80k and need to really cement my strategy so it work long term but also shows a steady return.
I have one guy quoting $99 a month, one £250 and one £750, you can probably see my problem.
Thanks in advance.
-
Great responses from Robert and Andy below that pretty much cover a lot of what you need to think about.
I don't know your industry and how competitive it is or your market and how broad that is (local / regional / national / world) so any real targeted advice is tough.
Also, Looking at your budget, you are not going to get a lot of SEO for £750 a month from an established agency. If you want content and links developing that kind of figure is just not going to do the job if you outsource it.
You could consider taking on an apprentice or someone interested in Internet Marketing and wanting to cut their teeth. This way, you could get a full time resource, someone who can tap into the masses of information out there and really do something with it.
If you can find someone who can research and write content and is happy with the more technical side of things as well great but the focus should be on someone who can create the kind of content you need to broaden your scope and earn you links.
There is just so much good information out there that if someone can come into your business, learn what you do and then use that knowledge to create valuable content, big content and promote it socially and via outreach to get links then certainly, six months with an approach like that will benefit you far more than six days with an agency over a six month time period.
You could potentially even use an agency to come up with a six month plan for you with a mind to have an in house
Consider the link bait guide from Distilled. Primarly produced by Ed Fry, a 16 year old intern. It has now earned around 500 links. This is not only a great resource for someone with a lot of time it is also a great example of what can be accomplished with time and dedication.
My advice would be to think about getting an intern for six months. Work with an agency to fashion a plan involving search, social, content, outreach etc and then use your intern to do the graft.
Some interesting reading from this perspective:
http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building
In this game you have to be practical and whilst skill and experience count for a lot on the strategic end, you can't get away from the need to do some great work to create the content and then the talk required to get the message out and get people to link to it and all of that takes time and effort.
I go into how to hustle for links a bit more here: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/earning-links-work-talk-hustle/
Hope that helps!
MarcusP.S. Avoid the $99 package - that can't be any kind of good.
-
I think you should focus on a full SEO audit first with actionable recommendations. Each SEO company should be able to give this to you with reasonable cost.
The actionable recommendations should be measurable. Some measures will be easy (i.e. implementation of a sitemap and improving the crawl-rate / index ratio) while other measures will be difficult (you want to increase your SERPs and organic traffic).
Best way to approach this is to set up KPIs which will then allow you to measure progress. It will oftentimes be very murky, especially if you do SEM at the same time.
-
ETSgroup
I would answer you first with this from GWMT regarding providers of SEO:
Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- What's your experience in my industry?
- What's your experience in my country/city?
- What's your experience developing international sites?
- What are your most important SEO techniques?
- How long have you been in business?
- How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
Today, everyone does SEO and unfortunately most who say they do cannot spell it. I see new prospective clients regularly who just had their entire site optimized and all someone did was put 30 keywords (and not even the best ones) on the page or wrote a paragraph for a title tag or meta description. So, yes, I have an opinion.
If your site is fairly new and was originally set up with keyword analysis done first, good on page/ on site SEO, etc. there is less for someone to do in that vein. If they are doing an SEO audit, with no guarantee of ongoing work and are a reputable firm/pro, the cost will likely range from $500 to $2,500 or higher depending on the type, size, etc. of the site.
Once that is done, it is on to what Andy writes about and content is first. Authorship, Rich Snippets and structured data like Schema, Links that are quality and are earned (recent WBF by Rand) are best.An ongoing SEO program of building links, etc. is difficult and expensive in time and people. For us with a site that is trying to get a lot of good links, we can charge up to $5K per month, but this is really having someone on it about 20 hours a week doing nothing but link building, etc.
If you are blogging it will depend on whether you are doing it or having copywriters do it. A decent page can run $50 to $250. (Length and Technical level, etc.).
I would look for someone who understands that SEO is not about ranking in Google, et al. It is about getting the business clients/customers/revenue, etc. What you have to weigh is what result you want for a given spend. If the site is bringing in customers, how many more do you need to spend say $500 to $1,000 a month? If you spend that you want to cover more than just the SEO piece, you want it to give you additional funds as well. My rule would depend on margins in your vertical, but probably minimum of 2:1 and more like 3:1 in most.
I hope this helps as I understand it is a difficult line to walk. Please check out those who say they do SEO. Make sure they have happy clients that will talk with you. Not that they never made a mistake; but if they did they owned it and improved.
Lastly, what Andy says about who to steer clear of is very important. Anyone who has some "special" way of doing it with magic windows, sites they own that link to one another, etc. cannot spell SEO.
All the best,
Robert
-
Never an easy question and I have no doubt you will be scratching your head a little after everyone has contributed because each SEO has a different way of charging, different rates and different strategies.
The only things I can tell you that will be (should be) the top of the lists for any SEO are, in no order:
- Content
- Authorship / Rich Snippets
- Links
- Page Quality
These are all based on some of the latest algorithm updates that Google is targeting heavily.
As for what to spend - how long is the proverbial piece of string? $99 might be a really good price if you are getting loads of really great work completed, but in reality, how much manual work will be done for this price?
At £250, that is a low-end daily rate with £750 being something towards the top end of daily rates (top being around £900 per day).
Try and get examples of past work and get a detailed breakdown of all of the manual work that is to be carried out. Steer clear of anyone who tells you they will build links to directories or do article marketing or that uses tools to complete important tasks.
Hope that helps a little.
Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Coverage impact on SEO
Does the coverage issues on google search console ( Google Webmaster) has an impact on SEO ( CTR or impressions). How much of a difference or impact will fixing these have on Search results and average
Algorithm Updates | | Rishardg0 -
Rerouting and SEO
I have the urls urlA.com (est 2010) and urlB.com (est 2015). The newest (siteB.com) is currently redirected to urlA.com. For branding purposes, I think it is important to market and direct traffic to urlB.com (the newest). What effect will it have on SEO if I make a change to switch those...and have urlA.com (which older site - 2015) redirected to urlB.com?.
Algorithm Updates | | Michelle08210 -
Confused about PageSpeed Insights vs Site Load for SEO Benefit?
I was comparing sites with a friend of mine, and I have a higher PageSpeed Insights score for mobile and desktop than he does, but he his google analytics has his page load speed higher than. So assuming all things equal, some quality of conent, links, etc, is it better to have a site with a higher PageSpeed score or faster site load? To me, it makes more sense for it to be the latter, but if that's true, what's the point of the PageSpeed insights? Thanks for your help! I appreciate it. Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Hi guys, I have a question about linking to a product page for linkbuilding. Does that count adversely vs. linking to a homepage?
Hi - so until now we have been building links via blog posts and articles and linking them to the homepage. It seems the ranking of some of my top keywords has fallen so had a few questions/concerns: Does it affect the rankings adversely if I link to the product page vs the homepage? What is rule of thumb for increasing rankings of inside pages/keywords and building links to them? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | DGM0 -
Sitemap Question - Should I exclude or make a separate sitemap for Old URL's
So basically, my website is very old... 1995 Old. Extremely old content still shows up when people search for things that are outdated by 10-15+ years , I decided not to drop redirects on some of the irrelevant pages. People still hit the pages, but bounce... I have about 400 pages that I don't want to delete or redirect. Many of them have old backlinks and hold some value but do interfere with my new relevant content. If I dropped these pages into a sitemap, set the priority to zero would that possibly help? No redirects, content is still valid for people looking for it, but maybe these old pages don't show up above my new content? Currently the old stuff is excluded from all sitemaps.. I don't want to make one and have it make the problem worse. Any advise is appreciated. Thx 😄
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Website dance on Google Map results and organic seo results
My website is daily showing different position on maps.google.com and for the last few days like yesterday it was on 21st position on some keyword and today it is no where and same with other keywords. Is this a Google Dance ?? what can be its period ? and what is tyhe solution to handle it ??
Algorithm Updates | | mnkpso0 -
SEO ANALYSIS ON A NEW SITE
Hi just would like if anyone could help me in provide some seo analysis on a new website http://www.ppilegalservices.co.uk/ main keyword is mis-sold ppi Its a very competitive keyword but not being able to come on google result in long tail keywords as well, Just got ranked on brand keywords like PPI LEGAL Services. Also running out of ideas as to how to create quality content any tips please? many thanks
Algorithm Updates | | conversiontactics0 -
This Guy Is Turning SEO Upside Down
Hi, Everything my competitor does goes against everything I have learned about SEO so far. For starters: he registered a brand NEW domain and within a space of **4 months and ** has a top ranking for one of the most competitive search terms on Google. he uses scraped content the navigation is almost non-existent. his backlinks seem dodgy. 1-page sites with content that doesn not relate. Bunch of links to other websites too And yet his site stats are as follows: Domain Authority: 72 MozRank: 4.63 MozTrust: 4.72 Linking Root Domains: 1725 On further investigation I discoverd that he owns a SEO company and that they in fact have achieved a #1 rank in various niches such as life insurance, car insurance, mortgage etc. On his SEO site he actually promises a #1 ranking in less than 4 months. The sample sites he lists on there all achieved #1 over a 4 month period...of course he owns most of these domains and then just sells the leads... So, my question is how on earth does he do it? Do you have any ideas Zane
Algorithm Updates | | Springboks0