Is it necessary to optimize every page of a site

[EricVallee34]

I recently took over the SEO work for a website that has a limited budget.  I'd like to use the resources to get as much as I can for a few pages on the site (keyword  research, on-page optimization).  Are there pitfalls to not optimizing every page on a site?  If so, what are they?

[danrawk]

Eric,

Every page is another opportunity to be relevant on a given subject. If you have a limited budget I would suggest determining the top 25 pages (or 200 - depending on your time/budget), building those up, and using their optimization successes as justification for a larger budget.

Nothing wrong with starting small.

Dan

[JoeAmadon]

I think it's fine to focus on a few/your most important pages, but I would take the time to make sure the internal linking/navigation is optimized for the entire/majority of the site. Letting bots crawl all your pages is the first step. Then focus optimization where you get get the most return.

[JamesNorquay]

If you have a limited budget I would work on targeting only a limited number of pages and a limited number of keywords.

You can run into problems where clients have limited budgets and they have a site with say 10k pages.

I don't think you would ever optimize every page of a website you have pages on sites like T's & C's and Privacy Policy Target the low hanging fruit and pages where you can gather quick wins, I would go top 10.

[MarcLevy]

100% agree with this. Depending on the size of the site I would also try to make sure you don't have any dupe content anywhere and that you have unique meta tags across pages (again, depends on size of site). As you never know where traffic may come from and what surprises are in store.

Then super focus on the sections of the site you feel are valuable, conquer and repeat.