SEO Tips: How much should I spend a month to optimise my website for Google?
Monthly payments are an affordable way for small business owners to optimise their websites…
But how much should it cost and what results should you expect?
How many sales or leads are you getting from your search engine traffic? If you use Google Analytics and have Goal tracking set up this information is quite easy to work out. But how many more sales or enquiries could you be getting, if you use an SEO company to optimise your site?
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How many extra sales or leads will it bring in?
This is really a better way to look at things. If say a SEO agency quotes £300/month to get your site ranking higher in Google, and their work brings an increase in sales of say £600/month, then in simple terms this looks a very worthwhile investment.
The problem is, generally speaking SEO companies aren’t able to say whether their work will deliver measuable improvements, not so much because they won’t, but more because they simply don’t know.
Can be difficult to predict how things will turn out.
A good agency should be doing work on your site that has delivered for their clients in the past, but search engines being what they are, and changing the goal posts every few months, can make it hard to predict, how things are going to turn out in the future.
So that brings us back to the question: how much should you as a small business, with limited resources spend a month on SEO? In my experience, you are unlikely to get any worthwhile returns for a spend of less that £200/month.
I’ve found you need to budget for £200/month or more.
You might be lucky and find a small agency or consultant, that can deliver good results at a lower price, but I’ve found most worthwhile results come from a spend of £200 or more.
What sort of results are the digital agency delivering for their clients?
If you are thinking of signing up with a SEO agency, then it makes sense to find out what sort of results they’ve been delivering for their current clients. Take a look on their website and find the clients page, or ask for recent websites they’ve worked on.
Check to see how their clients sites are doing.
You can then do a quick check yourself to see how those sites are doing in Google by completing a position check for a few relevant keyword phrases. I’ve written a short Guide to help with this.
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I don’t think you can put a budget of £200+ on an SEO package. Depending on the chosen phrases, small business owners may not even need a ‘monthly’ package. If in a relatively non-competitive industry, interested serving local surroundings i.e. ‘fitness instructor in LOCATION,’ on-site optimisation (working with content, heading structure, title etc.) could be enough and should be done as part of the initial development. Granted, most SEO agencies charging a few pound are not going to be doing quality work and probably won’t achieve much BUT don’t be put off and think you need £200+ as it really may not be the case depending on your key phrases you want to optimise.
Hi Simon,
Many thanks for taking the time to add a comment.
You do have a good point. I think where I was coming from was trying to make people aware that they need to put some kind of budget aside for SEO, especially, where things are going with Google’s latest updates, which can mean more time spent developing better quality page content. I do agree that for special projects, especially where the focus is local, it can be a lot less than £200 a month.
David
Hi David,
Yea I understand. Businesses, especially smaller ones that have no expertise in web marketing, should be careful when picking an SEO agency. Too many cow boys out there offering the world for peanuts!