Investing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) now is an investment in your business’s future revenue.
When people search for your brand or your targeted keywords in Google or through a voice search, does your website come up? Although achieving visibility and rankings in search engine results is not easy, it can be done. The purpose of this article is to show you how and provide you some key factors to consider when deciding your SEO budget.
But first, ask yourself these questions:
Do you own a business website?
Do you want the search engines to send visitors your way?
Does your website receive so-so traffic or no traffic at all?
Investing in SEO for your business. Get the right partner.
If your business website is receiving traffic, there is a good chance that your website is not receiving the traffic that it deserves. It is quite possible that your website is receiving average or poor traffic. If this is the case, do you want your business website to generate revenue? Isn’t that the goal of any successful business?
If you have a bricks and mortar store, you need customers to come to your store. If you have a website, you need website visitors for the same reason. The more visitors you have to your website, the more exposure your website will get. This exposure translates to more web hits which in turn translates to more potential customers and increased revenue.
If you are like most website owners, you have probably wondered at one point or another whether your website is receiving the amount of traffic it should. This question is usually accompanied by the additional question of “how do I increase my website traffic?”
“(It is recommended) that the greater of $8,000 per month or 5% to 10% of your business revenue go toward SEO.”
Find a partner that understands what the search engines expect.
Google sits on the throne of Internet marketing. If you understand and follow Google’s rules, there is a great chance that Google and the other search engines will send you free organic traffic to your business website. This free organic traffic translates to more website visitors. And the more visitors you have to your business website, the more customers you will attract.
There are over 200 factors to getting your website ranked, but Google’s senior Search Quality Strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, has made it perfectly clear, the 3 most powerful considerations are quality authoritative backlinks, length of content, and intent of the content.
So, do you have a website that caters to the needs of the search engines, and provides relevant information to your visitors?
Do you have content that is written and edited by experts who are well versed in the field of their content? Perhaps you have a member or members of your staff that write your articles.
Is your website categorized properly, and do you have a clear and precise Title tag that describes the content on your page/article/post. And do you have a Description tag that explains the content of your page/article/post. You also need well designed header content that sets the tone for what Google wants.
Title tags are one of the most important elements of a well-executed SEO campaign. Google wants to know what the content of your pages are so they can determine the relevance of those pages to keyword phrases. It’s as simple as that. If your Title tags aren’t telling Google what it wants to know, then the chances of your web site receiving quality traffic are slim to none. Here is an example:
This is the Title tag for this article: What percent of your budget should you be investing in SEO? The Title tag is limited to 60 characters, so don’t overdo it. Note: The Title tag does not include your business name or your business phone number. We see that far too often!
This Title tag includes the Focus keyword which is investing in SEO.
Here is the Description tag for this article: Investing in SEO is really an investment in your business’s future revenue. Learn the key factors to consider when deciding your SEO budget. The sweet spot for the Description tag is 150-160 characters.
Webmasters often complain about bad traffic to their websites. They complain because they see it as a hindrance rather than a help to their SEO campaign. The fact is that Google wants to see a well-organized website before they start sending you traffic.
E Internet Marketing Services can help you grow your business so that you can Dominate Your Local Market. SEO is worth the investment. It will help your business save money in the long run. By increasing traffic to your website through SEO, you will reduce your advertising costs and improve your ROI. If you would like to learn how, or just want more information, book a Discovery Session now.
Find a partner at a price that suits your needs and marketing budget.
When it comes to finding the best SEO company for you, it’s difficult to determine whether an SEO specialist is providing quality services. However, there are some key metrics that you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of their SEO practices.
Our agency has traditionally performed all these services for our clients. And we have been successful. Our websites have software that helps us with internal link building. However, the one area in which we sought assistance was in external link building. Why?
According to Aaron Haynes, CEO and partner at Loganix, one important aspect is the link building process. The number of high-quality backlinks (external) pointing to a website affects its visibility and credibility with search engines. An SEO agency that has strong backlink building practices is the perfect SEO partner to have in your business’s corner. High quality backlinks are essential to increasing your domain authority. While domain authority is not a Google ranking factor, high quality backlinks are.
This is supported by Gemma Fontané at HubSpot, “Domain authority can be a very useful metric to know the status of a website in relation to similar competitors, but we must emphasize that it is not a ranking factor for Google.”
Investing in SEO for your business. Key factors and questions to ask an SEO agency.
An experienced SEO agency should be able to walk you through their process and explain what they will do to improve your website’s ranking in organic search. We needed some assistance in external link building or in getting high quality backlinks for our client’s websites. We now have a strategic partnership with a company does that and more. Here is just a quick overview of the work they perform for our clients.
Blog or article content is the backbone of a successful SEO strategy. This can be difficult to offer to clients because of the time commitment it takes to plan, write, and edit content. Our clients struggle with this because it’s time-consuming and difficult to do. The above illustration includes 2 Guest Blog Posts each month with backlinks. These are among the most authoritative backlinks you can build.
Content REPURPOSING is a common tactic that we employ in our agency. Repurposing your content into other forms of media is one of the most powerful traffic strategies we leverage on your behalf. For example, a blog post can be turned into a video or several videos. That video can be used on your website and/or shared on any number of video and social media channels.
To make the most of your GBP, you need an agency that can help you set up and optimize your listing. We have a long history of success in this process. Additionally, we like to repurpose clients’s written content to video and post it on their GBP page.
Ask the agency how they handle citations. And be sure to ask the agency about their procedure for managing their client’s citations. Citations are online listings of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP). These Citations are found on social media and review sites as well as directories. We have some great AI apps that help us manage our client’s citations.
Here is a client who has been with us since April 2020. This is an example of great listing management with a great listing score. They started with a listing score of 581, which was well above the industry average. Their score is now 740. They are in the 97th percentile and well positioned get found in local search.
E Internet Marketing Services can help you grow your business so that you can Dominate Your Local Market. SEO is worth the investment. It will help your business save money in the long run. By increasing traffic to your website through SEO, you will reduce your advertising costs and improve your ROI. If you would like to learn how, or just want more information, book a Discovery Session now.
Note: Learn more about our agency’s performance in our article, “Our Internet Marketing Performance.”
Ask the agency if they manage your reputation on the Internet. Here are 3 simple elements of online reputation management. Our agency has other AI applications that helps us manage your online reputation. Here are 3 key elements of managing your reputation online:
E Internet Marketing Services can help you grow your business so that you can Dominate Your Local Market. SEO is worth the investment. It will help your business save money in the long run. By increasing traffic to your website through SEO, you will reduce your advertising costs and improve your ROI. If you would like to learn how, or just want more information, book a Discovery Session now.
How our Listing Management works
First, we check the accuracy of your business data across the Internet. Then, we distribute your business data automatically to the most authoritative directories.
Over time, this will also suppress any duplicate listings you may have. Duplicate listings occur when you perhaps changed your business address or business phone number. Google and the other search engines do not like that at all! It’s confusing to their users and detracts from your overall rankings.
Our software ensures that your listings are synced on a regular basis. We then provide monthly performance reports.
In the example below, you can see when this client’s business listing was last updated by the channel or source:
In this example, we told the software to post to this client’s Facebook Business Page and Google Business Profile. The software allows us to use stock photos, or we can use a photo from our client’s website.
Please note that in both cases we linked to the actual article on this client’s website. This is another great example of how we repurpose content. This is the third piece of content we repurposed from one article.
E Internet Marketing Services can help you grow your business so that you can Dominate Your Local Market. SEO is worth the investment. It will help your business save money in the long run. By increasing traffic to your website through SEO, you will reduce your advertising costs and improve your ROI. If you would like to learn how, or just want more information, book a Discovery Session now.
Investing in SEO: Can I do this in-house?
Before answering that question, let me establish some framework or background. According to a report published by Borrell Associates. Those agencies who do SEO in-house (at least with local businesses) report higher costs and lower returns versus hiring a consultant or agency, which yields lower costs and higher returns. According to the report:
“Those who use third parties rate the third party’s effectiveness higher than their internal skill. SEO and web design/development particularly skew towards third parties being more effective.”
Let’s face it, SEO is an investment in your business’s future revenue.
People find a website through impressions in the search results. Leads or prospects come in via your website. Prospects turn into sales, and sales drives your business. SEO allows businesses to own the top of the sales funnel. That is impressions of your website in the search results. And some sectors find organic search drives twice the revenue of other channels.
“”Investing in SEO: How much should you spend (2 Factors to Consider)
There are two factors to consider when determining your SEO budget:
- Competition, and
- Revenue
What is your competition doing? Are they ranking ahead of you in organic search? If they are, it’s very possible that they are investing in SEO. Organic placement of your website is a key to your success. What is your current keyword placement versus your competition?
This is an area where we begin our focus. The backlinks we create will raise your domain authority over time to help surpass your competition. This ‘time’ is dependent on your marketing area and the competition in that area.
Revenue is the second factor to consider when investing in SEO. How much revenue does your business generate monthly? According to Bruce Clay in his article titled: What percentage of your budget should go toward SEO?, “I recommend that the greater of $8,000 per month or 5% to 10% of your business revenue go toward SEO. In a highly competitive space, you should lean toward the high end. This is what you will see for businesses that are serious about competing.”
In deference to Mr. Clay, he works with large companies both nationally and internationally. Incidentally, he is credited with being the first to use the term search engine optimization. We work with small to mid-size businesses that do not need to budget $8,000 monthly for SEO. Our ideal client is a business that wants to dominate in their local market. And we believe all our clients must be investing in SEO. We have all the basic tools to do that job for them and we know what works. Furthermore, we have our web-based suite of tools to build a rock-solid foundation, a team of over 200 experts that we use to fulfill our services for our clients, and several strategic partnerships with both SEO and Pay-per-Click agencies that can’t be beat.
According to Aaron Hayes at Loganix, “typically, you can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to $5,000 per month for a comprehensive SEO campaign that will improve your website’s ranking and boost organic traffic. However, it’s important to note that some businesses may need more aggressive tactics – such as link building – in order to achieve the desired results.”
We cannot divulge our prices in this article. Every client is different with a different set of needs. For example, we see that a few companies are managing their own reviews very well and may not need that service. However, as Aaron Hayes mentioned, link building is necessary to achieve desired results. We do not consider link building an aggressive tactic. Our base package includes two high authority backlinks every month.
We’ve spoken to several CEO’s of agencies much like ours that have told us things like ‘I can’t see how you can do all that for that price’ or ‘Your price point is significantly lower than others in our industry.’
The only way I can explain it is “that we’ve managed to get our costs down to a level where we do not need to charge more money.”
In summary, investing in SEO is an investment in your company’s future revenue. SEO is not something that a local business should be trying to do in-house, especially small, and mid-sized businesses. Large companies may have the budget to hire a SEO specialist, but small businesses are more intent on staffing their business with specialists in their industries. Those who use third parties rate the third party’s effectiveness higher than their internal skill. SEO and web design/development particularly skew towards third parties being more effective. The real challenge is evaluating your competition and revenue and taking the time to find an agency that offers the best service and most reasonable price.
E Internet Marketing Services can help you grow your business so that you can Dominate Your Local Market. SEO is worth the investment. It will help your business save money in the long run. By increasing traffic to your website through SEO, you will reduce your advertising costs and improve your ROI. If you would like to learn how, or just want more information, book a Discovery Session now.
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