How Much Should Your Business Spend on SEO?

Did you know that most businesses under budget when it comes to digital marketing? It's true. Most companies spend about a third of their total marketing budget on digital efforts, but with the ubiquity of the internet in today's consumer market, it's a mistake to consider digital outreach efforts any less important than traditional media ads and marketing efforts.

SEO as a Slice of Online Marketing

When it comes to breaking down your online marketing efforts into a more granular budget, balancing SEO investments against social media, email, and other campaign styles is actually pretty easy. In fact, if you hire a full service digital marketing firm and set a realistic budget, most of them do the work of balancing their efforts for best effect on their own. It's always your prerogative to set priorities, but since the success of most digital marketing strategies depends on their interconnection with other efforts, it is often best to let the experts do their work.

How Big Should a Marketing Budget Be?

If your digital marketing efforts receive about half your total marketing budget, then the next step to making sure you are investing properly in online marketing is to review your total marketing budget. Most businesses spend between 7 and 10% of income on the combined set of marketing efforts in any given year. Companies that fall below this average tend to underperform for the quality of the product unless they are well established brands whose names are synonymous with their flagship products as a genre. Even then, the most successful legacy brands hit the window for the average. Those that overspend on marketing allocate resources away from core services that need to be able to handle an increased capacity for the business to grow.

Fine Tuning Your Budgetary Commitment

Before breaking down that budget and allocating funds to each of your intended campaigns, you should review your own finances to dial in the best investment for the year. When your company is building a customer base for established services or you are facing higher than average overhead, you may want to set the year's budget at the low side of the window. During years where you're launching a new product, location, or service then it's probably a good idea to dig deep and invest as much as is practical for the year. Reviewing this commitment annually with an eye on both last year's revenue and the company's planned steps to expand revenue gives you a chance to adapt as necessary, so you're always setting just the right amount aside for your marketing.

The Changing Role of SEO

Search engine optimization is still an important part of building a brand online, but its prominence has been steadily diminishing over the last half decade. The best strategies for SEO have also changed as search engine giants have altered their algorithms in an effort to showcase quality content that truly matches user searches. As a result, keywords are less important for the body of content than in the past, but they play a prominent role in the way crawlers index metadata, alt text descriptions, and other less visible components of each web page.

Content Beyond the Keyword

The bots trawling your site have also gotten smarter over the last half decade, and many are now capable of deep linguistic analysis that allows them to assess the quality and level of detail in the information provided by your content. That makes good resources and clean copy more important than ever, especially in light of the role social media plays in digital marketing. Of course, keywords for geolocation and highly searched terms are still important to search engine optimization. They just aren't quite as important as they were before the bots got so smart.

Virality: Your Key To Traffic & Ranking

When SEO emerged as the dominant digital marketing strategy to reinforce online ad buys, the internet was much simpler and offered less diversity of content presentation. You just couldn't make the sophisticated web design moves that literally animate today's responsive web pages. Social media is now the primary form of online engagement, with many people finding the majority of the content they read, view, or listen to through recommendations and posts from other users. When content goes viral on a platform, the platform itself boosts its exposure as well, and all that traffic to your site winds up increasing its search engine rank. That's why the best SEO for today's local searches winds up combining all your digital efforts to one end.

Build Your Local Customer Base Online

Today's best SEO is the most local, especially when it comes to marketing a small business. To get more information about how to dial in your marketing efforts to bring in local customers with digital content that has a wider appeal, you should talk to an online marketing team that really knows the Santa Rosa area. Contact Fitz Designz today and find out just how far your newly fine tuned digital marketing budget can take you.