How to Create and Manage an SEO Budget in 2024

‍If you are developing a business through a website, you have probably thought about the need for SEO optimization. It is needed to make the resource position higher in search results. Promotion allows you to bring more high-quality organic traffic to your site. Therefore, professional SEO costs are usually included in the budget if you need to get a stable flow of clients to a web resource for a long time. It remains to figure out how to create a campaign budget properly.

‍Saving money is a natural desire of business owners. Some people waste time on optimization and are ready to pay for quick promotion through contextual advertising. On the contrary, some people pay attention only to SEO to spend less money. Which approach is better?

‍The optimal strategy is to combine SEO promotion in general wisely and paid advertising at the right moments. For example, if new promotions are planned, the range is expanded, and so on.

‍It all depends on your goals and business characteristics. For example, a B2B company sells systems for controlling fares on public transport. They tell clients about themselves at business meetings and exhibitions and work under government contracts; the website is simply their online business card. When a web resource is just “for a show,” there is no need to adjust it to the requirements of search engines. If your business is thriving and you are satisfied with your current KPIs, you can do without SEO.

‍However, if you plan to develop your resources in the long term, regularly attract leads, convert them into clients, and work on the level of sales, SEO will be required. This is not a “whim” of search algorithms but your mutually beneficial cooperation with them. You provide high-quality content on a user-friendly site, and the search engine rewards and raises you in the results.

‍Saving on the quality of content and website will eventually, sooner or later, harm promotion. If you didn’t optimize the site or posted lousy text on the Internet, you lost your place in the search results for the topic. And vice versa: the more effort you put into a web resource, the more clearly it meets the requirements of search engines and user priorities. Content, usability, modern design, adaptation to mobile devices, and so on are essential for a website.

‍No two budgets are the same, even if companies operate in the same field. The fact is that potential SEO prices depend on many factors. Let’s talk about them in more detail.

Goals

‍The price of SEO promotion directly depends on the KPIs you expect to receive from it. For example, in six months, seeing 100 conversions per day or ten conversions per day on the site are two different goals. The budget will vary greatly. So, if you need to increase the number of conversions or visits significantly, be prepared to spend a lot of money on optimization.

‍What KPIs are usually taken into account for SEO purposes:

• website reaching the top: top 10, top 3 or top 1;
• the number of targeted visitors attracted to the site, that is, an increase in organic traffic to the resource;
• increasing the number of leads and conversions.

‍The scope of SEO work, a set of tools, and advertising platforms are formed based on the goals and objectives of the company. The best option is to combine search engine optimization and other promotion types.

Competition and Niche Features

‍The more popular the business niche, the more competitors there. This is a market law: the higher the demand for a product or service, the more companies offer it.

‍Let’s say you’re promoting pizza delivery or car repair. Surely, already established leaders in the market take over a significant portion of the traffic. Therefore, you will have to invest heavily in SEO promotion.

‍You can invest less in search engine optimization in a niche with low competition. You just need to get around the main direct competitors in the region. But you shouldn’t expect the same traffic figures as in a more popular topic.

‍How do you know if your niche is competitive? Enter high-frequency keywords related to your products and topics into the search, for example, “food delivery” or “online legal consultation.” Scroll through the first 3–4 pages of search results and study your competitors: how active they are on their sites, what content they publish, and whether they have “live” accounts on social networks.

‍If your niche has a lot of searches for high-frequency keywords, plan to increase your advertising budget. We will discuss reducing promotion costs through keyword frequency at the end of the material.

‍What other niche features can influence the cost of promotion besides competition? Preferences of your target audience. For example, young people are now looking for a cosmetologist or hairdresser, not so much through search as on social networks or through friends. After researching your audience, you’ll better understand whether SEO is most important to you over social media account promotion.

Site Type

‍The type of site affects the method and cost of promotion.

‍Informational Resources

‍Search results promote such sites more easily and quickly than other categories. They receive relatively a lot of traffic but are difficult to monetize. The conversion will be low if you deliver mainly informational content and “in-between” sell a product or service on the same pages.

‍Commercial Resources and Online Stores

‍This type of site will require serious investment in SEO. But visitors will definitely come to purchase your products or at least look at them on the store page.

Structure and Other Factors

‍The structure of the resource also influences optimization. SEO becomes more complicated and more expensive if the site:

• many pages and content;
• a lot of internal and external links are used;
• “heavy” widgets that will have to be simplified so that the site does not freeze;
• complicated or unclear navigation.

‍The time when the resource was created also matters. SEO will require less effort and money if the site has already been successfully promoted in search results and has a specific rating for several key queries. However, promoting a completely new website from scratch is lengthy and costly.

Region for Promotion

‍Depending on the region of your business, SEO promotion will ultimately cost you differently. Logically, overtaking competitors in the capital is more difficult, and specialists ask for a higher fee. For example, promoting your hotel to visitors in a southern coastal city will be more challenging because this niche is very saturated and in demand.

‍Also, the optimization cost is affected by the number of regions you want to advance. A specialist may have to create a website with subdomains and change tags, keywords, and headings for each version.

‍Thus, the price of SEO promotion is calculated separately for a specific project. There are too many factors that influence the cost and scope of work.

‍SEO differs from other work on a website, where a clear result is clearly visible; website promotion is more difficult to calculate.

‍Difficulties in calculating your budget for SEO services:

• Instability. The result of promotion is difficult to predict; it is unstable and depends on the behavior of search engines. Search engines may shift priorities when ranking, updates, and errors may appear that disrupt the work of optimizers.
• Investment in work. The main share of costs is payment for the work of specialists. What we invest in is different from what we get; it is difficult to deduce the dependence of the result on the efforts.
• The scope of work varies from site to site. It is difficult to establish clear standards of hours for the work of specialists; much depends on the type and subject of the site. For example, the semantics volume is different for all sites: for some service sites, this will be 100–150 requests. For an online store, there can be tens of thousands of them. Semantic preparation depends nonlinearly on volume, so it is impossible to calculate the optimal amount of time. It will take a little longer to prepare 1000 requests than 100, but not ten times, but three or four times.

‍Despite the difficulty in estimating, the budget for promotion can be determined.

‍How much does SEO cost? The easiest way to find out the amount of required time and money is to use an SEO cost calculator. This convenient tool can calculate the budget in seconds. You have to leave a link to your resource and specify the keyword you want to promote. The system will determine a budget sufficient to lead your site to Google’s top 10. As you can see, using an SEO cost calculator is easy and convenient. But if you want to do all the calculations yourself, let’s discuss the areas you must consider.

Work of an SEO Specialist

‍Choosing a mediocre but cheap optimizer is no point in saving money. An experienced specialist will spend a couple of hours on a task that will take three days to solve. The total amount may be the same when comparing cost and labor hours, but the quality will suffer.

‍You can hire an optimizer on your staff, buy optimization services from an agency, or work with a freelancer. A full-time employee will only work on the project of the company for which he works. He will spend more time on it but will not grow in competence. To develop, a specialist must promote sites on different topics as different from each other as possible, face complex problems, and learn to solve them. Otherwise, the company will have to purchase additional competencies that the optimizer on staff cannot provide.

Content

‍A content manager will have different costs for a content project and an online store. Articles are essential in promoting an information site. The complete cycle of publishing material includes the work of copywriters and an editor; the quality of the material must be high and competitive. You can view prices for copywriting and editor services on any online platform.

Technical SEO

‍Development is often forgotten to be considered, but it is also included in SEO as following the optimizer’s recommendations and working with the technical characteristics of the site.

‍Often, a company has its developer who implements the SEO specialist’s proposals, or the optimizer himself does this for an additional fee. The SEO cost of hiring a developer depends on their competence. Also, the price of the work depends on whether it is a full-time specialist or an agency performing the services.

Software

‍Services and programs for automating work are required; they allow you to solve problems faster, saving time for an SEO specialist. The software package is selected to suit the project’s needs: services for end-to-end analytics, collection and clustering of semantics, parsers, and others.

‍You can develop your software if you are unsatisfied with all the custom solutions. Development depends on complexity and starts from three million rubles, which includes the cost of hiring a team and about six months of work. Large companies with a large SEO budget can afford this solution. Refusal of automation will not save money. On the contrary, if you invest in automation, a specialist will spend less time on tasks.

‍When calculating the budget for SEO, you need to consider the work of all specialists involved in promotion. These are not only optimizers but content managers and developers. An additional expense item will be the purchase or rental of software for work. The SEO budget consists of the cost of work of all specialists and business opportunities and how much you can invest in promotion. In addition, you can avoid complex calculations and use a convenient online SEO calculator.