SEO Consultant Ireland

Here is a short checklist for creating your online marketing budget. Print it and try to set a figure next to each of the activity listed below:

Copywriting

• Web site copy
• Blog
• Press Releases
• Whitepaper
• Newsletter

Link Building

• Related Industry Directory
• Geographical Directory (your Local, or your  target market’s Local)
• Link exchange with related sites
• Blog commenting
• Forum participation

Branding

• Social Networking activity
• Company blog comments maintenance

Paid Advertising

• PPC
• Banners
• Link Purchases
• Blog or blog post sponsoring

As a general rule the best results are achieved if the budget is evenly spread between the marketing activity groups above. The tasks should be performed more or less in the sequence as listed above.

Each online marketing plan is specific to the companies activity on the web. It will contain clear goals and targets to be achieved. Make sure your online marketing budget is adequate to achieve your online marketing goals.

Any Business Plan has to include a Marketing Plan of some sort. For the Internet based businesses our Marketing Plan will most likely be one of the main sections. When it comes to writing the Online Marketing Budget, the whole list of problems start. Why is that?

Pay Per Click Budget

Online Marketing people will like budgeting for the PPC. Why? Simply because the cost of the PPC is predictable. And the whole PPC business is accountable (if you build in the Click Fraud in your formula somewhere). There is a cost per click, and volumes, and targets and markets… lots of figures you can work with – something an accountant will love.

SEO Budget

Where is where serious question marks are raised under the accountants head! What is the budget required for the search engine optimisation? What is the units, deliverables, and values of each? With SEO it’s all far less specified and defined than with the PPC. And SEO also consists of so many areas that it might be defined very differently by various vendors. The needs for the SEO are very different by every client.

I want to be #1 in Google!

In most cases marketing people with little online experience will have serious issues when defining the Budget for the SEO in their Marketing Plan. They will ask the SEO Experts, and base their SEO Budget on the quotes from the SEO Vendors. Most likely their definition of their SEO Marketing Goals will be – We want to be #1 in Google for …! In other words, they will tell the SEO Companies nothing really relevant that is needed to create a plan of actions and analyze the market and keywords in question to be able to establish the real amount of the work required – hence the cost of it. Ballpark figures and even figures completely imagined are therefore quite common in SEO. People ordering SEO Service do not understand what part of their Marketing Plan do they HAVE to disclose for the SEO Company to give back the realistic estimate.

What’s the cost of SEO?

Marketing people with no online marketing experience usually call the SEO Companies and simply ask – What’s the cost of SEO? The tendency is to disclose as little as possible of their real needs. With a bit of shopping around – hey choose the Best SEO Offer. Not asking themselves much why do the SEO offers differ so much and why does one vendor charge sometimes 100 times more than the other. Not 100% more, 100 times more!

The reason is that the one ordering the SEO service needs to understand the exact deliverables of the SEO web site optimisation. Understanding the tasks involved in the web site optimization work also greatly helps. Understanding the whole process and timelines – well that defines the Perfect Client for SEO!

Unfortunately that is almost never the case.

Those who understand SEO tend to find time to do it all themselves.

There are three basic stands you can chose when it comes to Online Marketing.

I don’t care about the Web!

You can simply chose to ignore it. Here are the reasons for it:
Your target market might not the using the Internet.
Your product or a service might not be applicable to be advertised online.
The scenarios above are less likely as days go by. So sooner or later you will have to face the fact. Internet is here!

I am monitoring it all!

Cybersleuth is by definition a person who searches the Internet for information about a company, both positive and negative, to keep abreast of public opinion by using the Web, Blogs and Social Networks.
This defines the ‘Passive’ activity on the Web. Cybersleuth absorbs information, cybersleuth is not a publisher.
Understanding your digital footprint is the core and the first step before you start managing it. You need to understand where you are, what the starting point is. You need to set your media marketing goals, and define a path how to get there from where you are.

Online Media Marketing Manager

Online Media Marketing Manager replaces the Cybersleuth with active publishing. Online Marketing is not just monitoring the media but actively publishing. Blogs, and Social Networks, Forums, Directories and all related web sites are the publishing tools. Your own web site is the main one tool an Online Marketing Manager has. Search engine optimization has the major role since it will help drive the publish to your site – traffic landing on the marketing messages you control and serve to your visitors.

Managing Search engine Results Pages (SERP) positioning of your site via the search engine optimization (SEO) most important task.

The most common question I get is:

How much does the search engine optimization cost?

The cost of SEO is in most cases far greater than the majority of those who asked me imagined. For some reason there is a huge percentage of people who not only think but are convinced that they should be able to get on top of the search results in Google, for next to nothing. The majority of those who had their web site designed by a younger family member or some student for a bit of cash, really strongly believe that the cost of search engine optimization should be the fraction of what they paid for the web site.

I wrote in a post SEO Budget, about the search engine optimization costs and how to estimate it.

Search Engine Optimization Cost is Determined by YOUR Marketing Goals

Do you need 100 or a 1000 visitors to look at your web site every day? The difference is 10 times in those two examples. The search engine optimization cost will be almost 10 times different to achieve those two marketing goals.

How Many Web Site Visitors do You Need?

Calculate your web site conversion rate. Let’s take it for example that you need 100 web site visitors to make one sale. Your conversion rate is therefore 1%. Now, how many sales do you want to make every day? 50 Sales? 50 sales times 100 visitors per sale equals 5000 unique visitors a day. You can calculate it for your site with the same formula.

Web Site Revenue

Now let’s take web site revenue into the equation as well. Imagine your revenue is 100 per sale. 50 sales from 5000 visitors a day with the conversion rate of 1% is 5000 a day. Note that if you manage to change the conversion rate for just 1% higher, to 2% your revenue doubles to 10000 with the same 5000 visitors, and therefore the same search engine optimisation cost.

What is your Profit per Sale?

Let’s say that your sales costs eat half of the revenue and your profit is 50. 50 sales a day and your profit is 50 on each make the daily profit of 2500.

Now let’s look at those figures on the annual basis. We had a web site with 5000 visitors with 1% conversion rate. Each sale is worth 100, and sales cost deducted the profit per sale is 50.

1 day: 50 sales of 100 each make 5000 in revenue with 2500 profit.
1 year: 18250 sales of 100 each make 1825000 in revenue with 912500 profit.

The number of unique visitors was 5000 a day so therefore 1825000 visitors in the whole year.

What is the cost of a visitor?

The cost of a visitor in search engine optimization is a theoretical figure. The cost per visitor can only be calculated in the search engine marketing terms. In the example above where there is 912500 a year profit and we know that to make that profit we require 1825000 visitors, we can simply divide the required number of visitors by the profit (marketing budget in SEM terms) and get a cost of a visitor of 0.5. That number is a defining number if the search engine marketing can or cannot be used to drive traffic to our site. If the traffic can be bought for less than 0.5 the business will be profitable. If the average visitor costs more than 0.5, the business will be in red by the end of the year.

As well as the cost of the visitor from the search engine marketing perspective, from the search engine optimisation perspective we can calculate the value of a web site visitor. It is again the same in the sample above 0.5.

How to determine the search engine optimization cost?

In the sample above there is 1.8 mil visitors required to generate 0.9 million in profit. If spread evenly during the year this means we need 5000 visitors a day. Divide the profit by the number of visitors per day and you get the value of each daily visitor of 182.5. This means that if you can pay your search engine optimisation less than 182.5 per the single unique visitor a day you will be making profit. If you are paying more you will end up in red.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Costs Vs. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Costs

NOTE: See the post about: Search Engine Optimisation vs. Search Engine Marketing.

Let’s get back to the beginning and compare the business running with investing in SEO and in SEM. You know your market so ask yourself a question:

Is it likely I will be able to pay 0.5 per click (per visitor) for a sale worth 100?

In my opinion there are not that many examples where this is possible. Now let’s look at the SEO avenue, and ask yourself if you know of a SEO company who will bring your 5000 unique visitors for 0.9 million? Now I know many SEO companies that would do it in many markets.

And now the fun part. Year 1 ended. The second you stop paying your SEM your business is on the flat line. With SEO the truth is that on the last day of year on and the first day on year two you will make the same profit, without paying anything for SEO. The search engine optimisation investment is a long term investment. When you build you rankings and inbound links, you will not really lose that traffic that quickly. At the end of the second year, you will even without investing anything in SEO still have some two thirds or more of the traffic you started the year with.