How far will $50,000 take me?

[NielsBohr]

I run an established retail business. We have been selling our wares online for 3 months. The industry is fairly competitive; >1,000,000 matches for generic searches. Approx 10 of our competitors have heavily SEOed sites, some are using multiple domains or have created their own "authority sites/directories.

Our PR is 5, the top competitor is 6. We have 30 backlinks in Google, the top compeitor has 300.

We are familiar with on page and off page SEO. We haven't done onpage SEO yet but are about to. Here is my game plan

Gain 1 quality/topical link per day (possibly outsource link building), on page optimization, content development - 1 page per day of 300 word pages. Improve usability.

I have a budget of $50,000 for the next year and am thingking of spending it like this;

$2,000/month on programming (usability improvment)
$1,000/month on content (some external copywriting)
$500/month on SEO consultancy
$500/month on Link building program

Questions: how far will this take us and how quickly? Are we missing something? Is the budget reasonable to get us into the top positions in a years time?

Thanks.

[glengara]

One thing missing from that mix is some selling/converting expertise, you might consider adding that.

That's a generous budget for an existing site, should take you pretty far if you don't mess-up.

Hard to comment on an unknown, but IMO you should structure the budget fairly loosely, there will doubtless be wide fluctuations in areas of spend month by month.

[Ledfish]

I guess my first question would be "Do you anticipate having another $50,000 next year and year after that and so on or is the continuation heavily dependent on the revenue return of this years $50K?" i.e. If we don't get $500K in sales from this $50K, then we won't have $50k to spend next year.

If that is indeed the case, I might trim the programmer budget a little and the content budget and put it into marketing. i.e. adwords, ppc and etc.

One other thing I would highly recommend is that the person doing the link building should be focus solely on that and it's success and not any of these other items. This will prevent them from getting distracted and frustrated by other issues. We ourselves learned this the hard way......won't make that mistake again.

Your budget may be practical but I can't say for sure without knowing alot more details. I would also urge you to think beyond just getting to the top of the serps, because once your there, then you need to continue to budget for staying there, because certainly your competitors will be trying to regain their lost position.

[The Contractor]

Agree with glengara. It seems like a generous budget for the amount of competition. Also, I would agree that you need to be ready for fluctations and some areas of your budget may need increased/decreased at certain times. Without knowing the details it is impossible for anyone to advise.

[tfanelli]

You may be doing this already but here is my advice. To get the best and fastest return on investment I would recommend spending most of that 50K on Pay Per Click on google and Overture. This will give you fast return. Traditional SEO is a long term thing, it wont happen overnight. Pay per click on the other hand will generate sales almost overnight if done correctly. You may already be doing this. PPC (pay per click) will enable you to generate money to fuel the long term optimization effort. Also, focus on making your site geared for sales or lead generation or whatever makes you money. With a good site and good PPC ads you should notice a positive cash flow faster than with traditional SEO.

[tfanelli]

I had another thought. If you are already doing PPC. I think this budget for traditional SEO is a bit high. You could staff a farily good SEO person for less than that. You could get a web designer, basic level and have him learn it for less than that. In a year you should have the results you want and have a staff person to continue the work. If you could find a good person who can write well and knows basic web design and is willing to learn SEO. Threy could use this forum and get up to speed very quickly.

[NielsBohr]

Thanks for the suggestions. We do PPC to the tune of $3k per month.

Regarding conversion help - good point. We are only converting a bit over 1% of the traffic at the moment. We are aiming to at least double that and the thinking is that usability and content (including good copy) will help this process. Specific conversion help will probably be needed and we have not come across many resources apart from at ClickZ.

If we strip out the programming bits (which is not all SEO stuff). It leaves a budget of $2k per month on content (copywriting and graphics), link building, general SEO advisory and conversion consultancy. What would your thoughts be on the relative importance of each?

As for future budget, if we meet our objectives it will be a reoccuring $50k/year or more.

[digitalv]

One thing no one really touched on here is the average price of the products you're selling online will be a HUGE factor in your advertising budget.

As long as your website is visually appealing and your shopping cart works, I wouldn't waste any money on programming or design. Put all of your money into PPC.

I currently spend about $10,000 a month on Google AdWords, and another $4,000 or so on Overture. That's nearly $170,000 a year just for online advertising.

Here's where you need to consider your product prices - My average sale is around $2,500, so I don't need to make very many sales a year to cover the advertising costs. In fact, I typically recoup a year's worth of advertising in a month or two.

You need to figure out what you're making on each product sale and calculate how many sales you need to make to recoup your advertising costs. Since you probalby don't know what your adverages are initially, I would suggest turning on the PPC so you're at the top (or at least top 3) for the first month or so and see how your online sales are. Then do the math and figure out whether you should keep doing what you're doing, or scale back a little bit.

For me, I always stay on top - plus I have good positioning and I'm usually in the top 2 or 3 searches anyway for Cisco part numbers and the like. ROI doesn't matter so much because the cost of a click is null compared to what I make on a single sale. But for less expensive products, you'll definitely want to watch that - sometimes being lower in the PPC SE's will help you more than it will hurt you, you'll get less clicks but typically more BUYERS because by the time they find you they've already visited other sites and couldn't find what they wanted, so your cost per acquisition is much lower.

So ... stay on top for the first month (heck even the first WEEK will give you some idea) and see how it does. If it's not doing well, don't wait - change stuff around until it does.

Once you're making extra money from the PPC (turning a profit) THEN focus on improving the site and doing the search engine optimzation, while still doing the PPC. Using AdWords/Overture will bring you business *NOW* - hiring people to do manual stuff takes time. Get the business now, and use the extra profit you make to hire people to do manual stuff.

[ogletree]

You won't get much for $500 a month SEO. People who know what they are doing charge a lot more than that. There are more people that need SEO than people that can do it well. You might find somebody but you will need to hire somebody else to fix what the $500 a month person did.

[NielsBohr]

ogletree - so how much does "real" SEO cost?

Bear in mind that we are looking for advice only and will implement onpage factors in-house. SEO will not do submission, link building (other than advisory) or copywriting.

What other tricks should we expect from a good SEO?

[glengara]

*What other tricks should we expect from a good SEO?*

Decent rankings that won't disappear next week.....

[nippi]

for $50,000?

I would expect a gurantee of all programming and rankings for 18 months.

I would contract that payment was performance based(eg rankings targets achieved as opposed to links gathered.)

I'd expect a re-built ecommerce system, a newsletter, an e-card system, all products loaded, a built in link management/marketing system, code written so the whole site was search engine friendly and crawlable, including all product pages, and I'd expect a multiple ranking criteria, eg top5 in at least 50 words, rather than 3-4.

ALl possible with this sort of budget

[SlowMove]

You won't get much for $500 a month SEO. People who know what they are doing charge a lot more than that.

There are a lot of people that claim to know about SEO. I've been at it for a while, and I'm still a student of the game. I would only hire someone with a proven track record.

[gopi]

If its a b2c product its better to start an affiliate program in a good network like CJ with higher payout/good terms than your competitors...this way you can hire many many good SEO's who are paid by performance :)

[dhaliwal]

wow,

you are spending whopping amount
If you pay such amount to few freelancers they will remain working on your website for whole day long for around 6 months.

Lol that would definately take you some where

Get Ahead Fast

Dhaliwal

[ogletree]

The reason some charge so much is because we have a reputation. At some point you get too many people asking for help and you have to raise the price. I don't have to prove how good I am. Most of the time I can't because I have signed a non-disclosure agreement with my other clients. My clients have to prove to me they can pay and that they will work with me. I will fire a client that is diffacult. The only promise I make is that I promise that I can make them more money. If somebody wants me to make some wild promise that they will be number one for some big word I tell them I an not interested becasue that is the first sign of a ignorant client. I make people money. That is all they need to know.

[identity_00]

Id focus on inbound links with the proper achor text and perhaps adjust your plan to focus on this more.
SE Results are mostly driven by anchor text - its really not that complicated..just time consuming.

[ogletree]

The backlinks is the easy part I hire a min wage person to do that. Getting a good list of keywords that you focus on is the hard part. I help people find those kw's.

[subgen]

one thing I'd like to point out. if your converting about 1% as stated I would look at rethinking your "call to action" and/or internal closing techniques as this seems a very low conversion rate if you are targeting your ideal, core biz keyword phrases.
my clients typically have 10-13% conversion in travel and 5-7% in real estate so I would definitely evaluate
keyword phrases and closing/action schemes.