What should I do on a limited budget of $2,000/mo
-
Hello everyone
I have started a new small business which currently we do only PPC marketing. We are spending roughly $1,700 per week in this medium, and would rather invest this money into getting ourselves organic. I am trying to figure out how we can best invest what money we have without stopping the PPC campaign, as we are only a month old with a limited budget ($2,000 month to spend on SEO).
Our website right now has a fair amount of content, and we are blogging 3x a week at around 700-1000 words average per blog. We have zero backlinks at the moment, or at least from what I can see on opensiteexplorer, and of course this is expected. I have used seomoz to optimize my pages, and keyword tool to figure out which keywords we want to go after. Some of the better keywords available seem like it would be very hard to get on Google first page as most of the links are authorative .edu/.gov links.
So we dont know exactly where to invest now. All our pages are optimized well via the seomoz tool, we get an A on all our pages for certain keywords. It seems to me the next step would be back links building, but I want to make sure and hire a reputable company (going to use the SEOMOZ recommended list) so we dont have issues in the future.
Before doing so I was hoping to get some input from everyone here as to what might be the best path to take on a limited budget. What are my priorities lets say if we could rank them? I should probably mention we are on facebook with 50 likes and about 50 shares via the blogs.
We are ranking on some of our keywords (only one first page on bing/yahoo, none on google), but I take this as a good sign for only having this website up for about 10 days. We have another website at first put up really quickly by a friend, then went to our new site.
Thanks for the help
-
If the website you are looking at is the one in your profile, then I'd look at improving your content so that it is easy to digest. Right now you have really long articles that aren't broken down with different headers. So, I can't quickly scan it to see if I even want to read it.
Anyway, a blog alone isn't going to succeed. You need to create a social media presence to gain attention for your blogs, and make them super easy to share/like/tweet/+1. That way they can potentially go viral.
-
First of all Congrats on the new website!
I am glad that you are serious about your marketing investment as most small businesses are more focused towards conversions no matter where they are getting from... off course PPC offer quick returns but investing heavily on PPC and ignoring organic is a worst business strategy I could ever imagine.
Anyways, in my personal opinion the budget is fair enough to start a comprehensive SEO campaign that offer REAL results and greater ROI. All you need to do is to invest it smartly!
1. Invest on Local 1<sup>st</sup>
If you are a local business (even if you are not but have a physical location) try to heir someone for local SEO submissions only!
Submitting a website to local maps, yellow pages websites and business data aggregators is a onetime game so the charges won’t be too much! If you have time you can even do it yourself by reading a blogs about how to go with local SEO.
2. On-Page SEO Audit and Implementation
With Local SEO try and find a SEO consultant who is ready to audit your website from the on-page point of view and fix the problems within the website accordingly. This will be on technical as well as on the content and design side.
**Target to achieve Local and On-Page optimization for the 1<sup>st</sup> month.
3. Social Media
This is a powerful ranking factor and can really help you lift your rankings in search engines but for a start I would advise you to start with using social media by your own and do not give it to the third party!
The major reason behind this is not only to save money but social Media is a platform where you can set your brand image in the online world so try to start by yourself as you know your business best! Later you can give your consultant to handle and manage your social media entities.
4. Link building
Now your Local and On-page is perfectly fit and you are done with your first month now hire a smart link builder to start with link building and management! I believe 2k a month for quality link building is a fine budget!
Over all your work to look in to different aspect will increase but as a result you will be able to get quality SEO services within your budget. Once you see some results started to appear in the SERPs and website started to give quality conversions... this is the time to increase your SEO budget and start with advance inbound tactics to grow audience around your brand and get 1<sup>st</sup> page rankings from the desired key phrases.
Hope this helps!
-
Yep, that's understood completely. I just don't want to wait around for 3 months to find out what we are doing is not enough and our rankings stink. Then after that period hire someone to help us which will take another 3 months. I want to do this correctly from today, we just don't have unlimited funds so I am trying to figure out what is the most important next step for us.
If it helps, we are a service business that does all our sales over the phone, no internet sales.
-
I do need to do more research on making our PPC better. Right now I do it myself and do not have much experience other than a few weeks of optimizing. I feel like all of our competitors are doing the same thing and hardly any are organic, and isn't something like 94% of all clicks organic? So there's a lot of clicks to be hard vs continuing only using PPC
-
Launching a new website and creating content is a lot like farming. You plant the seeds, water and wait. But then the harvest will come. Also from a consumer point of view the internet is instant gratification. Buy -> Ship -> Consume. But on the flip side...its a waiting game. Congrats on the new website!
-
Getting any site off the ground is hard. You gotta pound the internet pavement (so to speak). What I would do is find where your potential customers or users are, and get them to engage with your site. This could mean forums, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Quora, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc), or possibly PPC. If you're not selling something, getting a good return on ad spending can be hard.
Do you guys have experience managing PPC? There's a lot you can do with display advertising these days (retargeting, custom lists in Google Analytics, similar users, managed placements, demographics, audiences, topics, and so on). You might consider tuning your budget down and only keep the highest ROI campaigns enabled, and devote the rest of your budget to other efforts.
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
-
What is a good amount of social shares per week / day?
As the title says. What is your idea of a good amount of social shares to be given per day or week or month for a website?
Social Media | | Zoolander1 -
Do you still need 1,000 followers for rel=publisher
If I want to add rel=publisher from my Google + page to company website do I still need 1,000 followers or has Google lifted that requirement since launching the feature?
Social Media | | theLotter0 -
Google Auth and brands/individuals problem
So you can auth pages with personal google+ profiles - and its being suggested by some that this could now help rankings if that person has lots of people in their circles. So what about brand/companies content? why cant they auth the content with their Google+ profile to get the content ranking better. It doesn't seem right an individual blogger can do this but a company cannot who has written lots of guides. An example is a holiday company has written some awesome content on resorts around the World - how to use the auth for that content to rank higher? - currently only possible to link up an individual as writing the content not the brand/company itself. Any suggestions on this much appreciated. I do not want to lose any gain there might be from this new bonus given from Google.
Social Media | | pauledwards0 -
How can I gain links by creating infographics and/or memes?
It seems that both infographics and memes seem to be popular methods of creating good quality links at the moment, but how can you actually gain links by using these? When people share the graphics they will need to put an extra link in back to you and obviously most will be via social media so will not be worth that much to Google? Do I need to email these out to blogs etc?
Social Media | | harrygardiner0 -
Does buying thousands of Facebook Fans/Likes affect SEO?
To begin with, please pardon me if this question is ignorant. I'm completely new to this whole social media thing, and somewhat feel it is overhyped. I find it really difficult to believe that social media will actually help the majority of small business owners out there like me, and that most of them are probably being misled about the powers of social media to increase sales. Because it's mentioned so frequently, I've decided to delve into it a bit more to see how this could possibly help me business. Over the past few weeks, I've become familiar with a company that sells Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, as well as YouTube and SoundCloud plays. Since my official Twitter and FaceBook accounts really didn't have that many followers, I decided to buy a few thousand followers for each account. Initially, I bought them because I wondered what would happen if a customer that visited my online store happened to go to those Twitter and Facebook pages. If I personally see a Facebook page with few followers, I probably wouldn't give them my business. I would want to go with a company that seems to generate a bunch of traffic to their pages. Originally, I only had about 200 Facebook followers (now called Likes, it seems) and maybe 25 Twitter followers. I now have over 12,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook Likes. I may end up buying more since the service was pretty quick and affordable. I'd like to know if Google factors Likes and followers into it's formula for creating SERPS. Will my website rank higher if I have 10,000 likes, rather than only 200? If so, would it be a notable increase? FWIW, I found that more people organically started following my Facebook and Twitter accounts once I had more followers. I didn't change anything about how I maintained the page; I just had more people following them. One other thing of note: these companies are almost certainly using fake/hacked accounts to like various pages around Facebook/Twitter. You can tell because my Facebook page says some city in Croatia has the most amount of 'likes' of my page. Do you think this might come into play at all? Thanks for any and all help!
Social Media | | CHEATERS0 -
So if I wanted to monitor tweets about Lady Gaga and limit it to Austin, TX how would I filter this?
And lets say I wanted to do this over an extended period of time. And for bonus credits... is there any program that would notify me of each new tweet as it happens.
Social Media | | Thos0030 -
What would be a good way to drive traffic to a temporary post - job posting / classified ad?
I was wondering what would be the best way to drive traffic to a posting that will only last 30 days. I didn't think linking would be the answer, but wanted to get opinions. I was thinking pinging and social media (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter)... What would your strategy be?
Social Media | | RaginCajun0 -
Dud facebook likes / fake profiles.
I've seen a few companies pop up offering 'facebook likes' for sale. I'm assuming these are all dud accounts that are subject to get deleted in a second if facebook catches on. Anyone else have something to add?
Social Media | | qlkasdjfw0