How Much Should You Invest in SEO?

So, you’re looking to invest in SEO but want to know how much you should invest?

Well, you’ve come to the right place!

In this blog post, we’ve covered why investing in SEO is so important, how much you should invest, and how and where you need to invest your SEO budget.

Is SEO a good investment?

SEO should be a core part of your marketing strategy if you want to build your online presence, drive traffic to your website, and generate more leads.

There’s a common misconception that because SEO results in ‘free’ website traffic, SEO itself doesn’t require investment.

While it’s true that organic traffic is free compared to paid traffic, you do, however, need to invest in SEO. Investing in SEO means improving your website’s search visibility and increasing rankings to capture that organic traffic.

The key to ensuring that your SEO investment is worthwhile, is in-depth planning and monitoring to ensure you start on the best foot and stay that way.

How much should you invest in SEO?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer to this question.

Depending on what you want to achieve, the type of searches you want to be visible for, and your current level of optimisation, the amount you should invest into SEO can differ massively.

Rather than just listing how much different SEO tools and approaches cost, we want to cover essential steps that you need to take to determine how much you should invest and exactly where you need to invest your SEO budget!

What do you want to achieve?

Setting your SEO goals is vital in choosing how and where to invest your budget.

Do you want to:

• Increase website traffic and site authority?
• Build brand awareness and authority?
• Generate more leads and sales?

While each of these objectives involves increasing your website’s visibility in search engines, the approach to them and the required investment will be slightly different.

With increasing website traffic and authority, you’ll want to focus on keywords with a high search volume and build backlinks from high DA (Domain Authority) websites.

Building brand awareness and authority, you’ll need to build a strong content strategy focusing on informative keywords, providing value to your audience, and demonstrating your expertise.

Generating more leads and sales might involve targeting local keywords with strong buyer intent, and optimising product landing pages to maximise your conversion rate.

Once you’ve got clear objectives for your SEO, you can start to invest in tools and strategies to reach them.

How to invest in your SEO

Complete a Website & SEO audit

To get started, you first need to do a full audit of your website and the current state of your SEO.

If you’re unfamiliar with SEO and don’t have the tools or software to conduct an audit, you can contact an SEO agency for help.

Most SEO agencies will offer comprehensive SEO audits that will cover:

• Position tracking – identifying and monitoring the position of your web pages in organic search results for a range of keywords.
• Keyword analysis – what keywords you are currently ranking for, suggestions for improving your ranking for different keywords, and other keywords that might be worth targeting.
• Site audits – A complete website health check to identify errors and warnings in your site’s structure, design and navigation.
• Backlink audits – A report on the relevancy and toxicity of inbound links to your website and suggestions for building more valuable backlinks.
• Traffic Analysis – How many people visit your website, where they’re coming from, and how long they stay.
• Competitor Analysis – how your competitors currently rank for specific keywords, what backlinks they have, and how their SEO compares to yours.

If you want to have a quick look at your website’s health, take our free SEO audit tool for a spin!

Site Structure & Visibility

Site structure, internal linking, crawlability, and other aspects of technical SEO are vital areas of investment for your SEO.

Before investing in SEO strategies to boost your rankings, you need to ensure that your website is healthy and that search engines can easily find and index your pages.

This means identifying website and SEO issues, making changes to your website, and requesting indexing for any pages not listed on search engines yet.

As this can get quite technical and involves some advanced SEO, you might need to bring in some help from an experienced SEO agency if you don’t know to make these changes yourself.

Content Strategy

Crafting a great content strategy should also be a core part of your broader SEO strategy.

While creating the content itself can be pretty low-cost, if you’re using it further your SEO, you’ll need to invest in the right tools to make it effective.

This means using SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool for keyword research and analysis, using Grammarly to make sure your content is grammatically correct and isn’t plagiarising other online content, and maybe even AI tools like Jasper to make writing large amounts of content more efficient.

Building Quality Links

Investing in backlinks can be complicated, as search engines tend to frown upon and penalise websites that buy or sell links.

So rather than paying directly for backlinks, you can invest in reputable link-building services that will spend time building quality, contextual backlinks for your website.

You can also invest in memberships/partnerships with companies like Clutch, who offer listings for B2B companies and link to firms in lists like their ‘Top IT Consultants in the UK’ list.

You can also build links organically too. This can be more time-consuming and involve reaching out to other websites and offering to write guest blog posts and other linking opportunities.

Link building is very time-consuming. So you can hire a freelancer, or an SEO agency, to free up your time and still get more quality backlinks to your website.

What does the ROI look like?

SEO is a long-term strategy.

You won’t see immediate results and ROI from your investment, and it can take around 3 – 6 months to know if your actions are having a positive impact.

That’s why it’s essential to regularly monitor your website’s performance and visibility through Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and tools like SEMrush.

Keep an eye out for things like:

• More impressions in organic search results
• Increased organic traffic
• Improving site visibility and keyword positioning
• Growing domain authority (DA)
• Reduction in avg. bounce rate
• Increase in avg. session duration

These are all signs that your SEO is working and that you need to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing!

Many businesses give up on their SEO too soon because they underestimate how much work goes into fully optimising their website, and they expect to see results almost immediately.

With SEO, patience is vital.

Should you invest in SEO services?

You can always outsource to an external SEO agency if you’re unsure how to build and execute your SEO strategy.

Outsourcing comes with a lot of benefits, including:

• Having a comprehensive SEO strategy built for you
• Experienced SEO specialists managing your strategy
• You can focus on other areas of your business while your SEO is being taken care of
• Regularly reporting and reviews to ensure the strategy is working
• Your investment will cover everything – software and tools, planning and reporting, and execution of your SEO strategy.

If you want to learn more about outsourcing your SEO, take a look at our Specialist SEO Packages.