websense

Obviously, SEO is becoming more mainstream. Even the average small business knows that SEO exists and it’s something they need to consider. So, now that we know it’s something we have to consider, many clients are asking us “how much should I budget for SEO next year”. Talk about an impossible question to answer off the cuff. At least it’s difficult to answer honestly, off the cuff.

There is so much to consider when budgeting for search engine optimization, that doing so without at least minimal research is just foolish. Before we can provide fair and accurate investment numbers, we have to have information on at least the following things. Again, these are the minimums:

• Current rankings
• Site architecture (there are several things we check for that may impact ability to rank)
• Is it fully indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN?
• Keywords you believe you should rank for
• Log file info (basic stats including search engine referral rate, and referring keywords, etc.)

This information will give us the bare minimum to take a cursory look at your site and your industry in the search market. With that, we should be able to provide ranges with regard to what you should budget for an SEO campaign.

So, the gist of this is, don’t just pick a random number out of the air and insert it into your budget. If you call a professional SEO company and they answer you in 10 minutes or less, that’s likely what they are doing, so you might as well do it yourself. Quality SEO is likely to be expensive, and without the basic research I mentioned above, you’re really just guessing.

So, take a little time, do a little research to set an appropriate SEO budget. You might even have to spend a little money to pull that research together, but by paying for the research, you are only selecting a company to give you information. You shouldn’t have to commit your SEO campaign to them. It’ll be time and money well spent, if you do it. Your search engine optimization efforts will have much greater chances of success.

By the way, SEO should come from a marketing budget, not an IT budget!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.