Should I try to lower my SEO costs?

I’ve been asked many times about SEO. Search Engine Optimization. People believe that SEO is overrated or overpriced. Some want to save by cutting their budget on SEO efforts or outsourcing content creation to India. But a comprehensive SEO strategy guarantees that whenever your potential client is planning on spending his dollars, it will be with you.

With today’s way of buying products and services online, every dollar your competitor gets is a dollar you are NOT getting.

Why can’t I just outsource content to India and work my SEO here?

When working on SEO we can’t work with content generated by 3rd parties. Bottomline, a SEO strategy is based on keyword relevance not only for the site you are working for, but you also need to consider the competitive landscape. SEO is a day to day work that requires analysis and research on keywords and search terms, and content is created based on the daily fluctuation of those keywords. 

For example, we might see today that out of a universe of 500 key terms, 100 are generating the most traffic, so we will work on those. Tomorrow, it might be a different set of keywords, as our competitors might have done something with a particular set of terms. We would then recreate our list and work on recovering pagerank on the keywords in which we lost to some competitor, without neglecting the bulk of the 80/20, and still working on the rest of the keywords. 

The keyword landscape is something that requires us to create the content, post it, syndicate it, and promote it. It is an ongoing task.

If you outsource content generation to India, not only would you be getting copy not produced for your geographical market, but your keyword strategy won’t be compatible with your day to day research.

Could I just run a brief campaign – say 2 months – and then see if it makes sense to continue?

The time to ROI on a SEO strategy is at around 6 months. The first results start appearing within two weeks, and it is more noticeable by the end of the second month. This does not mean that by the end of the sixth month we could suspend SEO efforts, as doing this would certainly damage the strategy. Mainly because SEO is not only dependent on internal actions, but also on external factors that we might not have control over. 

SEO strategies are usually determined based on available resources. That is, the amount of hours to dedicate to a particular project, plus the cost of the tools. The tools have a fixed cost, independently of hours dedicated to the project or the actual size of the project. These are base costs that have to be considered in any and every strategy. As for the actual SEO expert hours, these consider planning, research, copy creation, execution (posting, syndication), analysis, adjusting, and reporting.

A project budget can not be reduced without directly impacting the scope. In fact, reducing the budget does reduce the scope and increases the time to ROI and expected results in most cases directly, and in the smallest projects, exponentially.

Finally, a SEO strategy requires external activities, among them, reputation management, which by itself has a fixed cost, which could include certain activities, such as monitoring, responding, boosting, and syndicating. The impact of reducing budget on reputation management would mean a less effective campaign.

Not doing SEO or reducing the scope and budget means losing market share. A potential lead with an intention to buy might not see the company doing a reduced SEO effort, and could end up buying from a competing company.