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
-
Facebook won't spend my ad budget. Any recommendations?
What do you do when Facebook won't spend your ad budget, no matter what you do or how high you bid? We've tested a large audience (2.2 million reach) under a single ad set versus many smaller ad sets with tighter targeting (50-150k reach). We've tested auto bidding versus manual bidding with bids as high as 1000% higher than Facebook's recommended bid. We've tested many versions of creative with and without text overlay and our relevance scores are high. Nothing seems to work. Our Facebook rep and Facebook technical support keep recommending to stay with one ad set and one ad, but that's not spending either. Most days we are getting less than 20% budget utilization. Has anyone experienced this situation before? Does anyone have any recommendations?
Social Media | | Liggins0 -
2013 - Google Places/Business to Google Plus Local
Hi, Much of the reading I've done has suggested that existing Google Places/Business Page (with "About" and "Photos" on top) will be automagically "upgraded" to Google Plus Local pages (with "About" and "Photos" and "Reviews" and all the other Google Plus items). However, is there a way to force an upgrade? I have a Google Places/Business Page and when I go to "manage page" it basically wants me to create a separate Google + Page for the Business. Is this the correct thing to do? Do I need to create a Google + Page for the company first, and then try to merge the Places listing with the new Google + Page for the business? Thank your for helping me clear this up!
Social Media | | Titan5520 -
How to autofollow anyone who tweets/retweets my blog?
I'm not sure if here is the right place for this Q but since followerwonk is one of the SEOmoz tools, I thought I'd try. I want to autofollow anyone who tweets or retweets specific URLs (my blog posts on a large blog). Does anyone know how to do this? They often don't @mention me in the tweets, I just see them all on topsy. I get 50-100 a day and at the moment have been manually going through and following all those people. It's been a useful exercise so far to see what types of people are tweeting my stuff, but now it has got super tedious!
Social Media | | KateV0 -
Does promoting a new page on twitter/facebook help it get indexed faster?
I know this probably won't matter much to people who get crawled on a regular basis, but for those of us who don't, does promoting a new page on social media help it get indexed faster with google? My site rarely gets crawled, but I've recently been adding new content. When I add new content I started to promote it on facebook/twitter and I do get minimal traffic from it. I noticed that a couple of the pages seem to be indexing quicker than pages normally do for me, although I'm not sure if it's because I recently migrated to WP or what..? I know T/FB are no follow sites, but is there a chance that promoting a page may contribute to the pages getting indexed? Thanks for any insight you can shed on the matter. It's more for curiosities sake than anything else. Pete S.
Social Media | | psokoloski0 -
Are links from Pinterest 'do follow'/do they have any SEO benefit?
Afternoon all, I know there is a question about Pinterest that was asked in February but I guess it was a fairly new beast then and people were still unsure about its use for marketing/SEO etc. I run an events business and on our Pinterest profile I tend to pin random stuff I find on the net, themes we are running (directly from our website) and other Pinterest users. I have received several 're-pins' and people are really starting to follow us now. What I am keen to know is whether or not having lots of followers/re-pins on Pinterest has the same effectiveness from an SEO perspective as having lots of Facebook/Twitter/Google+ followers and whether or not these re-pins are 'do follow' links or have any SEO benefit whatsoever? Many thanks Rob ps: Pinterest page is http://pinterest.com/eventa/ , if anyone has any tips on how to better utilize this then that would also be greatly appreciated 🙂
Social Media | | RobertHill0 -
Ways to get the most out of your content/blog posts?
I've been working on posting more content on my blog and now I need a workflow to help me get more exposure on my posts. Currently this is what I'm doing: 1- Write Post 2- Add it to my favorites in Stumbled Upon 3- Post it to Facebook 4- Pin it in Pinterest I would love some more ideas. My goal at this point is to gain greater web exposure. I would love to be they type of blog others actively follow.
Social Media | | continuumphoto0 -
Does the value of Twitter/FB shares change depending on the url used?
I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the use rel canonical. I just watched WBF and it brought up a question that I had. I had a situation where some of my pages could be accessed a couple of ways: www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24-keyword-rich-url, or www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24 I used rel canonical to tell the search engines that the keyword rich url was the one to index. Now, we all know that shares on Twitter, FB, etc. can add value to my site's SEO. So, if someone happens to be on the non-keyword-rich url and they click a button to share, do I still get the same seo benefit? Which brings me to a related question...if someone shares your content via a bitly or other shortened domain, is there any difference to the benefit you would get as compared to them sharing the full domain name?
Social Media | | MarieHaynes1