The Marketing Budget Mistakes That Cost You Leads 

Spending lots of money on SEO services each month is one thing, but actually seeing a return on your investment (ROI) is another. 

If you aren’t careful, you can fall into a marketing budget pitfall, where you wind up wasting far more money than you bring in. 

There are countless businesses out there that spend money on SEO each month, but they’re not necessarily investing. 

By that, we mean they’re not seeing returns big enough to justify their marketing spend, and they often have no idea this is happening. 

Reasons why vary, including:

1. Not tracking the right metrics, like focusing on cost-per-click instead of cost-per-lead. 
2. Investing in paid ads without optimizing your website for conversions. This means the clicks you pay for won’t convert into paid customers. 
3. Not knowing about all the components that contribute to successful SEO, like technical audits, content creation, and backlinks. 
4. Cutting costs by buying low-quality backlinks and using AI-generated content. 

These are all common marketing mistakes that businesses make, and they can cause marketers to falsely believe that SEO doesn’t work. 

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to fix your marketing spend so that you can actually achieve your SEO goals, so stay tuned! 

Mistake #1: Chasing Trends Instead of Focusing On Strategy 

Have you heard what so-and-so brand just did on TikTok? 

This is the type of question that can get marketers in trouble if they aren’t careful. 

It can be extremely tempting to follow exciting new marketing trends that are making waves on social media and other platforms. 

This is especially true if you notice some of your competitors striking gold by capitalizing on trending tactics (like influencer partnerships and YouTuber sponsorships). 

The problem?

Trends are all about short-term hype that quickly dies off. 

In other words, they don’t provide a sustainable way to ensure long-term success. 

Once the hype train reaches its station, it stays there for good. 

Let’s be clear here; we’re not saying that you shouldn’t take advantage of relevant trends, just that they shouldn’t comprise 100% of your marketing strategy. 

Many highly effective marketing techniques utilize trends. For instance, newsjacking is a form of digital PR where you insert your brand into trending news stories – and it’s a great way to build awareness and generate backlinks. 

We’re specifically talking about chasing whatever’s trending without having a custom strategy guiding the way. 

To understand why this is dangerous, let’s compare chasing trends with developing a custom SEO strategy. 

	Chasing trends	Custom SEO strategy
Generating leads	Can be promising at first but quickly dies off	Provides a consistent way to generate leads, especially with evergreen content
Cost-effectiveness	Trending techniques are notoriously expensive (paid ads, sponsorships, etc.)	SEO provides the lowest cost-per-lead (CPL) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) out of any marketing channel.
Long-term sustainability	Trends tend to disappear just as quickly as they arrive	SEO provides a compounding effect – meaning your ROI continues to increase over time

As you can see, you’re far better off optimizing your marketing investment with SEO than you are chasing fleeting trends. 

Mistake #2: Overspending on Paid Ads Without a Sales Funnel 

If you pay for advertising, you can reach the top of Google immediately! 

This statement is not untrue, but it is a tad misleading. 

While PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns on Google and other search engines do guarantee visibility, they can’t guarantee conversions. 

A mistake lots of marketers make is to pump money into paid ads without establishing a strong sales funnel first. 

If you want the clicks you pay for to actually lead to conversions, you need:

• Strong landing pages with immaculate sales copy 
• Convincing calls-to-action (CTAs) that encourage users to buy (or leave their contact information) 
• Retargeting so that you can pursue abandoned carts
• A pleasant user experience and solid website performance (i.e., fast loading speed)

Without this type of funnel in place, you’ll struggle to land conversions from your paid ads. 

That means you’ll wind up wasting the vast majority of your marketing budget. 

Also, don’t get hung up on measuring cost-per-click. While it’s important to target popular keywords that aren’t too expensive, remember that clicks can’t guarantee conversions. 

Instead, measure cost-per-lead:

CPL = total marketing spend / total number of leads generated 

As mentioned before, SEO content and backlinks build equity that lowers CPL and CPA over time, which consistently increases your ROI. 

Paid traffic, on the other hand, has a much higher CPL, especially if you don’t have a sales funnel. 

Also, the online visibility that you pay so much for disappears as soon as the money stops. 

If you don’t invest in SEO to wean yourself off paid ads, you can develop a costly dependency on paid ads, which can destroy your entire marketing budget (and strategy). 

Mistake #3: Ignoring or Underfunding SEO 

The reason why marketers ignore SEO is a cautionary tale about the dangers of instant gratification. 

When faced with the choice between SEO and PPC, the typical thought process is, “Why invest in something that takes so long to yield results?”

After all, paid ads will catapult you to the top of the search results instantly, and you don’t have to spend months creating content and building backlinks. 

As mentioned above, you’ll wind up becoming 100% dependent on paid ads for online visibility, and you’ll pay a sky-high CPL. 

SEO may take time, but it leads to compounding traffic and lower lead costs, so it’s worth the time it takes to get set up. 

Take it from us, the businesses that delay SEO wind up overpaying elsewhere down the line.

They usually wind up paying astronomical amounts of money on paid ads at first, only to spend twice as much on SEO as they would have if they had just started early. 

Instead of kicking things off with a modest $1,000 budget and then branching out from there, brands that delay SEO often have to spend $5,000 or $10,000 a month to catch up (by investing in advanced tactics like digital PR and managed SEO to bridge the gap). 

It’s a matter of the tortoise and the hare. 

The tortoise is like SEO, slow yet steady. 

The hare is like PPC (or chasing trends), quick yet expensive. 

If you’ve ever read the story, I think you know how it goes (spoiler alert, the tortoise wins in the end). 

SEO also includes technical fixes like improving site speed and performance, both of which are critical for your user experience. 

This is yet another reason why SEO is better for your marketing than PPC. 

Like we outlined in mistake #2, there are many ways that paid ads can backfire if your website isn’t fully optimized. 

For example, slow site speed and layout shifts are often enough to send users running back to Google’s search results page. 

So, if your website runs like crap, your paid ads will have abysmal conversion rates. 

If you engage in a comprehensive SEO strategy, you’ll include technical fixes like:

• Improving site speed 
• Fixing broken links 
• Improving site architecture 

These will make your website a lot more pleasant to navigate. SEO also includes things like CTAs and content creation for every stage of your sales funnel. 

Mistake #4: No Attribution or ROI Tracking 

It’s month 4 of your campaign. Are you any closer to achieving your goals?

For some marketers, the answer will unfortunately be, “I have no clue.”

That brings us to the next marketing budget pitfall, which is to fail to include ways to measure your progress. 

After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know about. 

A solid SEO strategy will include:

• Clear reporting. Tools like Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics 4 are essential for keeping track of your SEO progress. They have crucial reports for things like indexing errors, traffic generation, and user behaviors. 

• Keyword tracking. You need to know if your efforts are actually improving your keyword rankings or not. You can use GSC for this, but tools like Ahrefs and Semrush also help. 

• Lead metrics. Metrics like CPL, CPA, keyword difficulty scores, and domain authority are how you gauge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. 

• Key performance indicators (KPIs). You should also set various KPIs for your unique strategy, such as your total number of leads, client satisfaction levels, and desired traffic levels. 

Keeping track of these factors will help you get the most out of your marketing budget. 

While some marketers may be hesitant to sink money into tools for tracking and analysis, they should realize that they’ll actually save money and avoid waste by doing so. 

You’ve got to spend money to save money! 

Mistake #5: DIY or Piecemeal Execution 

“On this episode of This Old House, we’ll completely redo a website’s SEO by hand.” 

….Said no one, ever. 

Yet, that doesn’t stop marketers from thinking they’re Tim Taylor from Home Improvement and that they can handle their website’s SEO entirely by themselves. 

Let us be the first to tell you: the DIY approach RARELY works with SEO. 

Sure, it can work if you have enough free time to:

• Research keywords 
• Develop an original content strategy
• Create the original content 
• Audit the technical aspects of your website 
• Find backlink opportunities
• Conduct outreach to countless websites
• Maintain your social media profiles 
• Respond to all customer reviews 

Since SEO encompasses so much, it’s pretty much impossible for one person to handle, or even a small team (especially if they have other responsibilities). 

This leads us to the other mistake, which is to take a piecemeal approach to SEO. 

The thinking here is that since there’s not enough time to do everything at once, why not just focus on two things, like content and keywords?

As you can probably guess, this leads to a lot of neglected areas that will eventually come back to bite you. 

Also, content and keywords won’t be enough to outrank competitors who have strong backlink profiles. 

Instead of working yourself into a coma trying to handle SEO in-house, you’re much better off outsourcing it to professionals. 

With a managed SEO campaign (like HOTH X), a team of experienced professionals will handle every aspect of your SEO, ensuring that nothing gets left out (and that you don’t have to worry about it). 

Final Thoughts: Don’t Just Cut Your Budget – Refocus It 

There are lots of common mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to get the most value out of your marketing spend. 

Remember, it’s not about cutting costs, it’s about being strategic with your dollars to save money and earn more. 

As we’ve outlined in this article, not investing in SEO will wind up costing you more money in the long run, so your best bet is to get in as early as possible. 

Doing so will lower your CPL and CPA over time, and you’ll continue to generate leads and sales without having to pay nearly as much.

Do you want to review your budget and receive a roadmap to ROI-driven marketing?

We’d love to do both for you, so don’t wait to grab a spot on our calendar to book a strategy call!