Businesses worldwide have recognised the necessity of investing in SEO to enhance their online visibility, drive organic traffic, and ultimately, boost revenue. For example, in the UK, 42% of people use search engines when looking for a product or service. This is more than 2X of social media according to recent SEO statistics.
According to data sourced from X and Reddit, When asked what are the major costs in their SEO strategy, 35% of the 756,040 senior marketers (USA, 2024) indicated content creation. For more statistics on SEO budgets, see here.
However, when it comes to budgeting for SEO, many businesses don’t have any idea of the expected costs, how to measure ROI, or how to create a long-term plan that really works.
That’s why we’re breaking down planning and budgeting here.
Index
- Your business affects your SEO Budget
- Is SEO part of the Marcomms Strategy?
- How To Budget for SEO the Data Driven Way
- Calculating Your SEO ROI
- Planning Tips for Successful SEO Strategies
- SEO Tactics and their Costs for 2024
- SEO Budget Calculators
Your business affects your SEO Budget
We must remember organizations, be they businesses or non-profits like charities, don’t engage in SEO for the love of it. SEO is deployed to achieve an organizational purpose which is usually to drive traffic from target audiences via online search engines.
But how will the business you serve affect your SEO budget?
There are a number of factors which determines the appetite and ability of organizations to spend on SEO, which will be discussed:
- Size: large companies generally earn more and may be more likely to not only afford SEO but can also justify it because of their market opportunities – thus their budgets will generally be larger compared to a small startup.
- Funding: A company that is established (i.e profitable) or has secured investment funding (Series A from VCs, PE or other) will have the resources to justify not only headcount to hire the expertise in-house but also the software tools to support the new hires. Of course, this takes time so external consultants and agencies are likely to be used. Often, startups which have founders making decisions on marketing spend are likely to have zero to very little budget for SEO or any marketing for that matter.
- Business (B2B) or Consumer (B2C): This will be mainly determined by where the state of the economy is. Typically in low growth or recessions, B2B companies tend to have the bigger budgets for SEO because they are less sensitive to consumer disposable incomes and their lower spending habits. Ecommerce businesses that retail other products not produced in house will often be under tight profit margins and therefore will be highly sensitive to budget.
- Culture and Education: The culture describes internal perceptions on what works for new business development, the attitudes towards marketing, SEO (is it a trick or a serious endeavor?). The cultural attitudes are likely to be driven by the level of education on marketing communications. So if the internal understanding and appreciation of marketing and SEO is rather low, the budgets are likely to be low too.
- Leadership structure: The organizational design can be a strong indicator of budgets for SEO, which is partly correlated to funding. If the company has a Head of marketing, CMO or even a CPO then the budgets will likely be higher than organizations where say the Head of Sales or CTO is leading the SEO effort.
- Industrial Sector: The sector will be heavily influenced by the economic context it operates within. For example, businesses that are affiliate will likely be highly dependent on organic search traffic and will typically have larger budgets for SEO compared to businesses that manufacture goods and typically rely on distributors such as supermarkets..
Is SEO part of the Marcomms Strategy?
That’s the wider business, but what about the marketing communications strategy, typically known as marketing or growth?
The job of the head marketer is to understand the business and help it achieve its aims by telling the world about the business and its products. Of course, the marketer is likely to have limited budgets and time to achieve those aims.
Typically, the marketing leader will considering the following to decide whether SEO will be part of the marketing mix and how of the total marketing budget should be allocated to it:
- Brand positioning: The values and positioning of the brand will have some effect on the budget, particularly if so much effort has gone into it. Companies or non-profits with weak positioning are less likely to care about SEO or marketing in general. By contrast, some brands may be overly focused on brand that other channels get overlooked.
- Audience Profile: Marketing research may suggest that audiences don’t search online for the products or services they sell. Conversely, if the research shows audiences will perform online searches, budgets will be allocated to SEO.
- Channel ROI: Marketers also have to contend with the decision of how to allocate budgets. Market mix models can help by plotting ROI curves against spend for each channel which can help determine how to split the budgets accordingly.
- Purpose: Marketing serves different purposes from building brand awareness to driving buyer ready audiences to purchase or enquiry. Fortunately for marketers, SEO can generally be relied upon to provide touch points for the brand to connect with the users throughout their online search for the products and services. If driving purchases or enquiries are of the highest priority then SEO is likely to have a heavier weighting.
- Timing: Every marketing leader follows some seasonal component in their decision making whether it’s Black Friday, internal budget cycles or the market for their audiences which impact the timing of the budget for SEO. For example, supermarkets will often plan SEO products 3 months in advance as a minimum.
- Measurement: The measurement emphasis or culture in a business will also determine the budget levels for SEO. If campaign performance (i.e. conversions) can be measured to the satisfaction of the business then SEO will likely secure more budget. Pathway attribution which is not widespread is an opportunity to measure the contribution of all channels not just SEO, to give a more data driven view of not only audience pathways to conversion but also the value of a channel.
Naturally the above considerations are for any channel not just organic search. Social media, for example, would be subject to the same scrutiny as SEO would.
How To Budget for SEO the Data Driven Way
Assuming SEO is required and part of the Marcomms strategy to achieve the business goals, the next task is to work out how best to maximize that budget.
It depends, is such a common answer by SEOs to virtually questions, it’s become an industry joke. However, we can’t avoid the factors that will determine the required budget to succeed at making SEO work for your organization, which starts with:
- Commercial targets: Revenue or Sales Qualified Leads will form the SEO targets to be met by organic search. Given the channel is keyword driven, it follows that much of the data will be a combination of keyword research sourced from direct competitors data (using 3rd party tools), synthetic social listening data and 1st party data from Google Search Console (GSC). The object of the data merge of traffic and commercial value is to size up the opportunity which will form the targets. Data science can extend this further with forecasting.
How To Create an SEO Budget
To create an SEO budget, you need to audit your current SEO performance to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Then, you need to estimate your costs. You can do this by breaking them down according to content creation, link building, technical improvements, and any other SEO services needed.
Based on your goals and available resources, you should focus on the most impactful SEO strategies first, as this will maximise your investment.
Last but not least, remember that SEO is not a once-off endeavour. It’s ever-changing and ever-evolving, with Google making thousands of changes yearly. You need to continuously monitor the performance of your SEO efforts and adjust your budget accordingly to ensure optimal results.
- Competitors: The keywords can then be used to determine the organic competitors based on the search results (SERPs). From there, data covering all aspects of the SEO workflow will be required to determine the strategic gaps i.e. technical, content and authority.
Calculating Your SEO ROI
Once you’ve determined your SEO budget and where you’ll spend your money, you need to know how to measure your return on investment.
You can do this by tracking your website traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates before implementing your SEO strategy and thereafter. After collecting this data, you can calculate the revenue you generated from conversions and subtract your campaign costs. To get your ROI, divide the net profit by the cost of the campaign.
The formula for calculating your ROI will look like this:
(Total value of all conversions – SEO costs) / SEO costs = ROI
Planning Tips for Successful SEO Strategies
- Strategy: In marketing, marketing mix modelling is a useful tool to determine the channel offering the highest ROI for the next dollar (or pound) spent. SEO is slightly different, however thanks to data science this can still be approximated by modelling the search value page rank (SVPR) and attaching costs to determine the highest priority (by ROI) workstreams.
While you need to plan ahead to ensure you get the most value out of your SEO budget. You also need to know the money is well spent i.e. the SEO activity is actually going to deliver.
Before planning your content strategy, calendars and so forth, such haste will make waste if you don’t consider how SEO is working today, where it’s going in future. That’s because there are more businesses that want to be top of Google than there are spaces on the first page.
So you want to pick a SEO consultant with a proven track record and with a data science approach, afterall search engines are data driven.
Assuming you’re working with the right SEO leader, you’ll know the operative areas that will deliver the highest payoff in the shortest time period which will lead you onto tactics.
SEO Budget Statistics
When asked about the major costs in their SEO strategy, 35% of the 756,040 senior marketers (USA, 2024) indicated content creation. The chart below shows the breakdown of major costs in SEO budgets.
Sources: Reddit, X and TikTok
SEO Tactics and their Costs for 2024
- Tactics, Scope and Timing: With the workstreams known, it’s a matter of getting these in the order according the strategy model.
You need to plan ahead to ensure you get the most value out of your SEO budget. This means creating a content calendar and implementing regular updates to keep your website fresh and engaging, monitoring SEO trends and algorithm changes, and tracking your performance using analytics tools.
While the SEO strategies you spend money on will depend on the factors above, the most effective in 2024 include:
- Keyword Discovery: Surfacing keywords your target audience actually uses to search for your products and services. Data science helps uncover the value you’re not already getting by modeling the traffic potential of your and your competitors keywords. We use social listening tools in addition to the usual data sources to really tap into the topics your customers truly care about. Content optimised on that basis will outperform any other competing content relying solely on conventional best practice means.
- Content Marketing: Proprietary data driven content with your unique perspective will comfortably meet Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines as it remains the cornerstone of SEO. Proprietary data is what gives your content a unique perspective and helps your site stand out from the competing also ran websites churning out content designed to perform well in search. A SEO copywriter will generally charge $350 for a single 1,000 worded article.
- Technical SEO: Ensuring a website operates optimally with fast load times, mobile optimisation, and secure connections (HTTPS). A SEO consultant’s technical audit will range from $2,000 to $5,000.
- Digital PR: Earning high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites boosts domain authority and search rankings. But it also drives brand awareness, brand searches and traffic, which is the true measure of authority. Digital PR campaigns involve both creative (from $1,500 per piece) and promotion ($600 per backlink secured from outreach assuming these are organic i.e. unpaid).
- Local SEO: For businesses with physical locations, optimising local search will drive substantial foot traffic and local engagement.
- SEO Tools and Analytics: Investing in SEO tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and performance tracking can provide valuable insights and streamline SEO efforts. If budgets allow, attribution modeling is a must for both determining the true value of SEO and the content paths your users take to purchase or enquire. ()
Statistics on SEO activity expenditures
According to data from Reddit and X (2024), when asked which SEO activities are most invested in, 43% of 1,058,905 marketers in the USA indicated content creation. The chart below shows the full breakdown of major SEO activity expenditures.
Sources: Reddit, X and TikTok
SEO Budget Calculators
A good SEO budget calculator, one which we’ve developed and thus the basis of our 200% ROI guarantee will consider the following:
- SVPR: The search value page rank of your website content relative to your market competitors, which maps the internal pagerank to the external pagerank and the commercial value of the content.
- Content Coverage: Your audiences are searching for answers online and search engines rank content in response, so you’ll want to have content covering every possible question your audience members will dream of.
- Content UX: Your content needs to deliver the answers in a way that maximises the user experience so there will be costs involved in the research, writing and presenting (think media production).
- Costs: of proprietary data to inject perspective into your content, the content writing costs, outreach, identifying technical solutions and the implementation.
Budgeting and Planning Key To Getting Great Results
With Google processing 6.3 million searches every minute and over 50% of customers using the search engine to discover or find a new brand, SEO is essential for any business aiming to enhance its online presence and drive organic growth.
By understanding the costs, prioritising effective strategies, and continuously monitoring and adapting your approach, you can maximise the return on your SEO investment and achieve long-term success in the digital landscape.