How to maximise your SEO marketing budget

It is no secret in the marketing industry that SEO has been paving the way to success for big players in the industry. Technology and the use of digital space helped improve search engine standards. With this success, marketing and SEO professionals continue to improve themselves as they race to reach page one visibility in most search engine tools. They can do this since they have optimised SEO strategies and budget to execute it.

A company could spend between $5,000 to $10,000 in a month to execute SEO strategies. While this is an immense budget already, the question remains, is it enough to reach page one visibility in search engines? This budget can be enough for others who know how to maximise it to reach their goals. To ensure no budget is wasted, find out how to maximise your SEO marketing budget in this article in line with your campaign strategy.

Allocate your budget

Prior to making a budget request, you need to determine how you will allocate the SEO budget according to your marketing strategy for the month. Consider the allocation of the budget according to effectiveness, relevancy and timeliness of each strategy. You could separate them by rating them like the sample below:

• Social Media - 20%
• Ad placement - 20%
• Graphic design content - 10%
• Content creation (Copywriting) - 20%
• SEO link building - 30%

Analyse your marketing campaign

Analysing your campaign will help you determine which part of the marketing strategy would need more attention. To analyse your campaign properly, you can do the following:

• Take a look at your monthly traffic. Make a comparison over the past 3-6 months and see how the traction flows.
• Next, check the report from your advertisements if it gets you enough site visits. Determine if your ad runs effectively and gives you enough leads to deal with? If it does, then it could be a potential client. However if it doesn’t, you could be missing something. From data-driven reports, you can allocate a portion of Ads placement to SEO campaigns instead.
• Check other parts of the campaign, website traffic, the landing page that gets the most engagement, and the articles that get the most views.
• Pull a report from Google Analytics to see how social media connections add up to the discovery of your website.

Knowing the information listed above allows you to create an effective SEO marketing budget. After all, you need to look at all sections of the campaign, check the data-driven reports, and then determine how much your SEO budget will be.

Set parameters for your budget

Now that you have an idea of what to prioritise in your campaigns and a basic computation of the budget you need, you have to set parameters for it according to your SEO strategies. For example, if you get a 30% money allocation for SEO how will you use it and what are the limits of the budget?

Here are the basics to consider when setting parameters and allocating your budget:

• Do a site audit. Figure out the common errors or bugs present on your website.
• Compare the off-page or link building results across media where it was extracted from e.g. guest posting, social media networks, referral traffic or search traffic.
• Check your local SEO campaign competition.
• Keyword research report and analysation. Do a keyword research approach analysis on your website and the competition based on the niche you are competing against.
• Aim for long-tail keywords. This will help you be seen more especially if you have a small budget and you can’t compete with large keyword-based campaigns yet. Just make sure that you have the right keywords so you can build links with relevant sites to get the most link juice from them.

Create an effective SEO campaign with your budget

SEO is not a one-size-fits-all since you have to set up different strategies for various marketing campaigns to ensure they’re successful. With this in mind, it’s best to analyse your position in the market first and get data-driven reports to justify your next strategy. Once you’ve determined what’s effective and what isn’t, then you can set up an SEO budget and maximise it according to your campaign.

If you need help with marketing and SEO campaigns, then let us make it easier for you here at QWERTYlabs! We’ll do the work for you so you reach your brand goals in a shorter time.