How to Invest in SEO: 4 Tips to Start Investing in SEO

Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) requires defined goals, approaches, and methods to guide you through the process. While it takes time and effort, it offers long-lasting results that continue to increase in value over time.

Keep reading to learn the benefits of investing in SEO and get tips on making your investment successful! 

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Why invest in SEO?

SEO is a long-term digital marketing channel that helps you reach an exceptionally large audience. In addition to dramatically lower costs compared to traditional advertising, SEO also:

• Improves your website traffic quality: SEO tactics help improve your ranking on search result pages, making it easier for the people most interested in your brand to find you.
• Builds credibility and brand awareness: An SEO content strategy will help you identify content that your audience finds the most helpful. Reliably producing that content builds your credibility and helps establish you as an authority. As your ranking increases, so does your visibility, boosting your brand awareness.
• Helps improve your user experience: Part of SEO is optimizing your site for different browsers and devices, creating visual interest, and optimizing your page loading speed. Creating a positive user experience encourages users to stay longer, and the increased dwell time boosts your ratings and attracts more traffic.
• Increases your long-term return on investment (ROI): SEO is a long-term continuous investment that targets the organic searches that account for over 50% of website traffic. An average ecommerce company will see a nearly 800% annual ROI with SEO.
• Aids your long-term success: A solid SEO strategy will maintain consistent traffic to a site over time. As you add more content, you’ll see exponential growth.

Is it worth investing in SEO?

According to 89% of marketers, SEO is worth the investment. Making SEO worth the investment requires an effective budget, strategy, and team (whether in-house or with an SEO agency).

How much do I need to invest in SEO?

While most businesses invest $1500 to $5000 per month into SEO, how much you need to invest in SEO depends on your goals. For example, if you’re looking to add 100 vs. 25 pages of SEO content to your site, that will require a larger investment.

It’s important to mention that search engine optimization is not pay-to-play.

Making a larger SEO investment does not equal faster results. Instead, a larger investment will enable your team to scale your SEO efforts more, which can give you a competitive advantage.

For example, if you produce 10 new pieces of SEO content each month while your competitor produces two (and they’re of similar quality), your business could expand its search real estate faster than the competition.

How long should I invest in SEO?

Search engine optimization does not deliver results overnight. Instead, SEO takes three to six months to work, which means you’ll want to invest in SEO for at least three months (though we recommend six).

What kind of ROI can I expect from my SEO investment?

Your SEO investment’s return on investment (ROI) will depend on several factors, including:

• Your SEO expenses
• Your profit margins
• Your buying cycle

At minimum, you’ll want to earn at least a 2:1 ROI on your investment, which you can calculate with this formula:

SEO Revenue – SEO Costs / SEO Costs x 100

How to invest in SEO

To turn your SEO into a successful investment, view it as a new business procedure rather than a temporary strategy. Embracing it as a digital marketing channel will help you get the most out of the resources you put in.

You can set yourself up for SEO success by developing your goals, mapping your intent, developing your approach, and planning for the future.

1. Start with a clear intent

The first and most important step in defining your investment strategy is determining your end goal. Consider what you want your SEO to do for you. Do you want to improve your reputation for customer service? Are you most interested in increasing your market share?

Choose the goals that will serve as the foundation for your SEO strategy.

Be sure to make your outcome goals SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Once you’ve set your big-picture goals, you can create benchmarks to serve as milestones along the way. For example, if your outcome goal is to increase your organic traffic, you might make it a shorter-term goal to re-optimize your old content.

Now that you have your goals, you need to decide how to measure your progress toward achieving them. The most valuable key performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking your SEO strategy’s performance include:

• Conversion rate
• Organic traffic
• ROI
• Sales growth
• Search rankings
• Social media traffic
• Inbound links

2. Understand your approach

It’s essential to understand SEO as a long-term investment.

Thinking of it as a marketing tactic with clear steps leading in a straight line will likely leave you with unrealistic expectations. Rather than a tactic, SEO is a marketing channel that requires consistent attention and upkeep.

When it comes to seeing the effect, it’s important to find a balance between patience and expectations of results. While SEO likely won’t immediately create measurable outcomes, you should start seeing them within six months to a year.

Be sure to monitor your results and adjust your strategy accordingly.

The other critical part of your approach is to match the goal of SEO — ensuring users have a pleasant experience and can find what they’re looking for. It’s easy to focus solely on Google’s rules and rankings. However, it’s important to remember that you’re designing for people. Keep these tips in mind as you invest in SEO for your business:

• Understand and employ good website design.
• Address user pain points on existing websites.
• Use A/B testing to evaluate your changes.

3. Define your logistics

Rather than trying to optimize for all of Google’s more than 200 ranking factors, you’ll want to decide which ones to invest your SEO budget in. 

It’s best to target just a few factors based on your SEO goals. A good place to start is reviewing Google’s most important SEO ranking factors, including:

• Internal links: Follow a user-centered strategy to create an internal link structure that guides users toward conversion.
• Backlinks: Use your content and contacts to attract inbound links to your website. 
• High-quality content: Create helpful content to encourage users to spend more time on your website.
• On-page optimization: Optimizing for Google’s featured snippets and Discover will help more users find your site.
• Page speed optimization: Follow page speed best practices to optimize loading time for your website’s pages.

Once you have an idea of the areas you want to focus on, take the time to develop a solid SEO strategy. The steps you take should reflect your focus areas and further your goals.

4. Keep moving forward

Since investing in SEO is a long-term commitment, it’s vital to understand that even the most important ranking factors might shift and change over time. Today’s top ranking factors might not have any impact a year from now.

You can protect your investment with these tips for staying up to date on the latest SEO trends:

• Make time every week to read about SEO news.
• Subscribe to SEO blogs like Google Search Central, Search Engine Land, and the Moz blog.
• Set up Google Alerts for SEO topics.

You can get a leg up on your continuing education by collaborating with a professional SEO consultant. A consultant will provide professional advice and opinions to help you develop the SEO expertise you need to keep your strategy current.

If you’d prefer to outsource your company’s SEO work, you can hire an SEO services company to build your strategy and oversee your optimizations. SEO consulting services can also be an excellent option for businesses looking for expert guidance without fully outsourcing their needs. Hiring a dedicated service ensures you’ll have a team of professionals monitoring and improving your SEO in keeping with the latest practices.

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