What should I do on a limited budget of $2,000/mo

[DemiGR]

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

[WhoWuddaThunk]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

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^st

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^st 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^st page rankings from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

[DemiGR]

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.

[DemiGR]

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

[SEO_Mechanic]

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!

[john4math]

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.