websense

Post Author: Jennifer Geh
Something we’re seeing in the SEO Industry is a lot of question and debate regarding how to charge for SEO. Since the industry itself is still in the early growth stages and determining how to set pricing, creating different pricing and package models etc. it can be exceedingly difficult for a site owner to compare and price SEO Services. Obviously, this makes budgeting for SEO equally difficult.

To my amazement many site owners and corporations will opt for huge PPC budgets in lieu of doing SEO simply because the process and the spend can be too confusing. PPC is usually pretty straight forward from a cost standpoint, or at least it seems so. In my opinion it’s a shame that a customer would rather spend more for less results (in the long run) simply because the industry has made pricing difficult to understand.

I don’t mean to be negative about PPC, it definitely has it’s place and purpose. However, when compared to Natural Search Engine Optimization, the long term impact isn’t as cost effective.

So, how do you budget for SEO:

Start by trying to answer the following questions before throwing a random number in a spreadsheet or your “SEO RFP“.

• Was your site professionally built? This can impact the amount of work an SEO/Development team will have to do to make it search friendly.
• Is it performing well/at all now? Do you know your current Search Engine Referral Rate? Are most of your search referrals using your name to find you or generic product/service phrases?
• Your Competition: Are they optimizing? Do they have professionally built sites?
• Your Market: Are they a savvy group? Heavy online users? This will give you and indication of how much business you might be missing out on by overlooking SEO.
• What are your expectations? Do you expect the web to contribute significantly to your sales?

If you start by answering these questions, you’ll begin to understand how important Search really is to you, what state your site is in now and whether or not you should budget a significant portion of your marketing budget to SEO.

At the end of the day, good SEO isn’t going to be cheap. It can cost anywhere from $10,000.00 per year for a small business to hundreds of thousands per year for a large business with a large site. So, in the budgeting process, it’s worth it to take your time, answer the questions above honestly and plan your budget accordingly. Your SEO budget shouldn’t be set by how much is left over in an IT budget, or Marketing budget. It should be determined by how much work there is to be done, and how important results are to your business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 3:03 pm 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.