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How Much Should You Budget for SEO?

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Cost of SEOLike it or not, to move products or services, you must market your marketing. SEO professionals and Internet marketing consultants don’t always agree on SEO pricing and budgeting, but on average the SEO budget recommendation works out to 4 – 5 times the cost of the website. In other words, if a company’s annual website re-design/webmaster maintenance/content update budget is $10,000.00, SEO and other Internet marketing should be between $40,000.00 and $50,000.00.

Preposterous you say? Many years ago I prepared the newspaper ads for a small music retail outlet. They paid me about $80.00 a week to layout a 1/2 page ad for the weekend paper. Running the ad was $4,800.00 that week. An ad agency writes, then story boards and shoots a commercial for $100,000.00, but the air time can cost millions. One of my clients currently forks over $1,200.00 per month for a Yellow Pages ad that probably cost fifty bucks to layout on the computer. A flyer may cost $400.00 to design, but $15,000 to mail out. The big money has always been in the distribution; not the media. When you look at the media-to-distribution ratios of other marketing vehicles, SEO is seriously cheap!

Most website owners have it exactly in reverse. They’ll invest only a paltry 5 to 10% into SEO and other Internet marketing. The results will almost certainly be disappointing. The most drop-dead-gorgeous Webby-award-winning website without traffic is like having Clio-awarded  4 color process (with varnish accents, die cutting and embossing of course) brochures stacked neatly in boxes in the storage closet, where they remain forever. How important are the aesthetics of the website very few eyeballs are viewing?

Small companies often feel they can’t afford to invest in SEO. They’ll build a budget site for three or four thousand and then throw a few dollars after it with a $19.95 site submission package or perhaps a $49.95 link building bundle. When that fails to generate business, they'll throw more into the website, of all things. If they really only had a 3K budget, what they should have done was invest $500.00 into the site and $2,500.00 into SEO and Internet marketing, developing the articles and backlinks that provide a top-5 ranking on Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search. Even a butt-ugly website (while not recommended) with a steady flow of qualified traffic will always outperform a sexy site with little or no visitors. A website without traffic will only add to overhead.

Your Vancouver SEO experts at the Cole Wiebe Agency, offer monthly SEO plans at very affordable rates. Even a small company can afford six to nine months of aggressive SEO to begin driving traffic to their site.

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Update
November 17, 2013: A lot has changed since 2007, when this post was written. Please view these newer posts:
How Much Should SEO Cost?
Cost of SEO: Why Is Great SEO So Expensive?
SEO Rates: How Come SEOs Charge so Much?

They Can’t Buy From You If They Can’t Find You

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If you’re disappointed with the return on investment from your website, you’re hardly alone. A website that costs more to build, maintain and host than it generates in new business is a liability. It’s not working for you, but against you.

As advertising tools and business investments, most websites totally bomb. Why? Because their Internet marketing strategy sucks. Search engine optimization and website promotion are public relations, sales and marketing… not design. Very few web ‘designers’ posess the social networking skills required to market a business effectively online without the assistance of an Internet marketing consultant or SEO professional on their marketing team.

Here’s the part that gets me. If a website fails to produce a return on investment, most clients are satisfied with the pathetic excuse that they are ‘building a web presence’. If it was a print ad campaign through an ad agency or publication the same business owner or executive would fire the agency or pull their ads without a thought if they failed to bring a return. Why has failure become so acceptable in Internet marketing? To be worth a damn, marketing must produce positive arbitrage — that is, it has to generate more dollars than you invest in it.

Let’s face it; the industry actually rewards failure. Most web designers and even internet marketers have no skin in the game. They get paid the same whether your site delivers a return on investment or not. Attractive design is sexy to look at, but even award-winning web design doesn’t guarantee traffic, sales and leads or cash flow (except for the design firm 🙂 . In fact, the more expensive the design, the heavier the losses in most cases.

Bottom line: When it comes to Internet marketing, the design is only appreciated by your visitors after search results send them to your site. Who cares about feel good terms like ‘developing web presence’ or ‘mind share’. The only thing that’s going to put dollars in the bank is market share. Your website only has any value when you’re making money from resulting leads and sales.

If your internet marketing sucks, fix it! Convert your website from a liability into a powerful asset.

Extended On-Page Search Engine Optimization

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In 2002 I built my first affiliate marketing website after investing in several affiliate marketing ebooks. An SEO strategy advocated by various affiliate marketing experts involved building 5 or 6 HTML product pages, then building text links from the menu bar to these product pages. With the product pages built, the publisher would then publish a few new article pages every week, linking these articles to the product pages. Over time, 50 to 300 pages would link to each product page.

Hundreds of internal backlinks would greatly improve the site’s Google ranking while also providing hundreds of potential content pages, each linking to a money page.


The Affiliate Marketer’s Website Model was so incredibly effective on my affiliate sites that we began to add article pages to our SEO client’s sites to improve their rankings as well. If you’ve been missing out on the power of internal backlinks, give the Affiliate Marketer’s Website Model a try.

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