SEO Budgets, the million dollar question???

[etsgroup]

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

1. 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

3. what I need to be focusing on in priority order, a top ten in sorts

4. 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.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[RobertFisher]

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

[MagicDude4Eva]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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!
Marcus

P.S. Avoid the $99 package - that can't be any kind of good.