February 2014 - Ontarget

Do you value an SEO based click the same as a PPC click or a content marketing click? If so, you’re probably undervaluing your SEO budget. It’s not easy to fully determine the value of SEO based clicks. There’s a large percentage of the digital population that will enter a companies URL in the search window. This type of traffic knows your brand so keyword strategy really didn’t come into play with those clicks. Marketing departments and marketing teams need to think about consumer touch points as a whole. This goes beyond attribution and econometric models. Your investment strategy needs to compare SEO budget results to your investment in other media channels. It’s not easy to calculate the return from an SEO budget these days. The reason for that has to do with the amount of SEO competition and the continued changes to the search engine algorithms. PPC when done well can be a very lucrative digital marketing tactic. If a company tries to do it themselves because it looks easy it can be a huge budget suck. Just because it’s easy to calculate the results on PPC all the way through the site it shouldn’t mean you should discount your SEO budget. It takes a little more work and setup but you can monitor and track your SEO efforts against your SEO budget. We have tools that can tell us the PPC value of a keyword that was entered into an SEO search. Proper SEO does cost and you should set an SEO budget but you need to make sure your properly funding it compared to other marketing tactics. Here are 5 questions to think about when comparing your SEO budget to your PPC budget: How should your overall media budgets be set? Should customer influence and branding be figured into your results measurements? Should you invest the additional time to create and optimize a Google+ profile because of the impact it has on your SEO? Should the value of an SEO click be based on CPC spend that it would have taken to get that click in PPC? Are your SEO, content marketing and social media efforts combined from a strategy and/or service provider? They are so connected to each other today it’s hard to separate them. It’s not about investing only in the platforms that work. We know that a customer needs to see your brand in multiple channels to have the best chance of pulling them in. However, you don’t want to budget in a silo. You need to budget by what the channels bring you in measurable return.

Archives

SEO Budget Compared to PPC & Content

Mobile Development

Mobile Marketing

Web Development

Internet Marketing

Solutions