The Problem: How to determine the right budget for your SEO service
When trying to come up with the correct amount for any project we are usually dealing with a lot of uncertainties and information that we just don’t have or don’t have sufficient data to relay on, this is even more true in an SEO project due to the nature of dealing with Google’s algorithm which is private and extremely complicated, additionally we are not working in a void but there are competitors and market changes, because of these reasons the end results of SEO project is never certain and we cannot guarantee a positive ROI.
Two types of budgeting mistakes
The basic two mistakes that can happen are insufficient budget or over inflated budget. A monthly and on-going SEO project usually takes somewhere between 6-12 months and in competitive niches it is a critical part of the marketing team. The price of an over inflated budget is wasting resources and the price of an under budgeted project is lowering the success chance of the SEO project, the reason for that is that competitors in competitive niches usually have high enough budget so in order to compete with them the budget needs to be more or less in the same “league”, in other words a small 500$ SEO budget per month is not enough to compete with the top SEO in your nice that have a 15,000$ SEO budget per month.
In order to calculate a reasonable estimation of an SEO project we first need to understand and know few terms:
- Relevant Keyword Groups First we should find the relevant keywords sorted out into keyword groups, this is a process that should be re-evaluated and updated every few months, so we can find all the opportunities to rank for relevant keywords in our niche.
- Total Search Volume After we’ve finalized the relevant keywords, we can find the average search volume for all those keywords combined.
- Avg CTR The average Click Through Rate is the average number of clicks (and visits) we get from the total search volume of the ranking keywords.
- Conversion rate is the percentage of sales/leads/ calls that are converting from the organic traffic users.
- Average Sale Price is the average sum of all sales divided by the number of users that converted
- ROI Return On Investment would be increase in the organic traffic conversions deducting the SEO project costs
This SEO project budget calculator is a simple yet relevant tool to estimate the proper SEO budget for your business, niche or website.