-
Does anyone else spend $20k~ a month in SEO? What do you get for it?
-
This thread shows the gross range of people in or around SEO globally in this subreddit.
That’s a high budget but perfectly reasonable depending on the size of your company and 1. the amount of $ SEO brings in and 2. The amount it could be (the opportunity size).
I’d say if you’re unsure then it sounds like u don’t have a vp of marketing (or at least not a good one). Even if u don’t know SEO specifically, knowing if you’re getting any return out of a marketing budget should be transparent without reports from them.
I’d suggest for that level of spend to spend an extra couple thousand on a consultant. A current or former digital marketing vp or an experienced SEO who is unbiased (as in they’re not looking for active contracts or can’t even support ur budget personally – so they have nothing to gain) and have them review the work from time to time and just check in plus maybe add a couple notes for that team to check out. As much as an agency probably wouldn’t like getting a few tips, the reality is they can be mentioned in a non “hey do this instead” way and agencies unfortunately train from leaders down to the newbies doing the work…. So everyone in the place has the exact same knowledge which for SEO can have some limits.
TLDR: get an external review!
If you want to dm me the site and their start date I’d be more than happy to take 5 min and pull semrush data (3rd party seo performance tool) to see if the needle has moved at all.
-
I made 2 new case studies. Making case studies isn’t fun even if you get excellent results. That’s all I wanted to say.
-
You really need to get an evaluation of what you need, and if you are already pretty sure, try to understand there are a lot of ways this could go depending on who is handling it.
At many agencies, you will be a small fish, and you may not get the best bang for your buck even at a decent spend.
At some agencies, you can get decent value for this spend up front, but if you don’t continue, it’s going to feel like you aren’t getting a ton of ROI for your money after a few months.
At a smaller agency that is very good in your industry, and has complementary customers and built-in connections, this might be a very good value for you.
Working with a small team at 20k a month can also be a low value proposition in-house, but working with a set of good freelancers, it might be a very good value.
If you are willing to buy links, you can probably get early value with the budget being moderately high like this, but you need to make sure you are prioritizing your buy through – conversion optimization, lead tracking, follow-up, pipeline nurturing, sales force, customer service. Also, buying links has some stigma attached.
Many problems can come in the form of “growing pains”. But since we don’t know what you have in place, and what you have been spending up to this point, 20k is a figure that doesn’t solicit much very good information.
If you are a mature company that already owns your region and you want to spread nationally, 20k might mean very little value for the first 6 months. If you are a local that owns your local area, and want to spread regionally it might be a moderate value proposition. If you are a new business, without even a Google Business Profile, 20k is going to slingshot you with the right team. But if you are already spending 18k and moving to 20k, someone would have to evaluate what you are doing already in order to help you understand what is realistic.
95% of the people you are soliciting here for opinions are providers of services, or people who are trying to learn because they don’t have 20k a month for SEO. So take it with a grain of salt.
The guy who said R.I.P. to your DM’s was right.
If you have read this far, I’d offer the following advice:
—
If you are a service provider make sure you you have the ee’s and structure in place to handle the new calls and not waste the spend.
If you are into content marketing, demand that it’s done right.
If you have an already large website, demand that you get deliverables, and understand exactly what is happening – make sure the reporting is robust, and I don’t mean some automated SEMRUSH pdf. I mean: what was done, and why, and by whom and how are the future metrics to be tracked?
Set goals. Make sure you have a dedicated rep that you know, understands the work being done, and isn’t just a sales person.
If you can, get extensive road maps built and pay a couple other reputable SEO’s for their opinion on the road map. It’s worth it to see the different perspectives. Otherwise 20k will disappear faster than will feel comfortable, and you won’t have a lot of perspective until after it’s too late, SEO wise.
Do not sign on long-term, no matter how sweet a deal it seems, until the service provider can prove that they have delivered on value. In fact, be hesitant to spend 20k a month on SEO, until you know you are with the right provider.
If you aren’t sure – push 5k towards it, get some actual work done, and spend 10k on PPC to get leads/sales directly (if you need them) until you are convinced the SEO firm/provider can deliver.
20k spent on technical SEO may not be worth as much as 20k spent on content, and vice versa, depending on how it’s performed.
—
If you want a real answer, the minimum understanding any true professional would need to give a halfway decent opinion, is as follows (bare minimum):
* What is your Domain?
* What is your outlook on your industry?
* What has changed in your company in the past 18 months?
* What does your traffic look like and how well does that current traffic convert?
* What have you done in the past to get where you are?
* What is your general goal for growth?
* What does your internal marketing/sales flow look like? Are there any staff in place, and what would their role be?
* What competitors are you gunning for?
* How long are you wanting to push 20k a month towards organic and SEO related work?
* Do you have a person in-house that can interface on technical understanding, or company information etc.?
* How quick will approvals be given, and what if any, is the compliance timeline workflow? Who will the “buck stop with” on public facing content – who will approve public facing content?
* What are your metrics for success?
* What ancillary benefits are you expecting?
* Will there be other service providers involved other than the company providing SEO?Good luck either way. Feel free to send questions if you want.
EDIT: spelling/formatting
-
It depends..
-
Yes. I have seen many clients spend well over 20k for SEO work. Unlike paid marketing you need to add a bit of.muscle to SEO for it.to.give any results which it will and it will keep on giving. Patience is required in SEO and it should not stop else all that has been done will be lost. Companies spending low amount ts in SEO should he worried as it will probably not get them any results.
-
I have worked agancy side where 20k was our gold package. For that you would get:
– SEO strategy including: what areas of your site need links, keyword research and content beiefing.
– Tech SEO audit with prioritised solutions tailored to the business needs (perfect SEO is not always the best for the business)
– Reactive newsjacking with at least one monthly outreach cycle
– Data campaigns – 6 to 12 a year, including ideation, data work, content creation and outreach
– Hero campaigs – 3/4 per year, including the same as data campaigns
– Monthly reporting, tied to actual revenue numbers.I’m currently working in house with a lightly smaller budget than that and a very different set of priorities, but from this side, that ammount of work for 20k a month seems like a lot and I would not trust it’s being done well.
-
Spend should be tied to revenue from the channel, KPIs/objectives, and then consideration for what you actually need
-
We accepted a client for $500 and increased their organic traffic by over 100% in a month. 100% white hat & $0 spent on back links. Writing over 1500 words per month targeting the right local audience & ranking on page 1 & 2 already for local & near me searches. $500 is not the usual price, but if I’m not confident enough about a Niche business or website, I like to test the waters first before asking for more. And clients are pre-informed about it.
For $20K a month. I would hire 2 full-time employees in-house. 1 content writer, 1 digital marketing & seo expert. And keep a budget aside for an seo tool, and outsourcing more content writing or social media management. 20K should be good enough to get 2 happy workers and still have money to spare.
The employees will do most of it, the remaining fills the gap in your employees skills. They will send you reports and you could ask them anything for a 100% transparent SEO.
I just realized I only have about $5K – $6K for myself at the end of the month and it’s so much work to manage a business, writers, freelancers & clients. I should probably consider working full-time for a Company myself. Will probably make more than that to manage 1 instead of 8.
-
We spend more than 40k on SEO each month and I’d happily triple that if I could find people at the level I require. Hand picked In-house team managed by me though. I wouldn’t trust any SEO agency to deliver what we do or even close.
-
Money shouldn’t be the key metric you are using, as that creates opportunity for someone to take your money and deliver no value.
Figure out what business value you want, and then ask for quotes on achieving that, then benchmark results regularly.
SEO is highly situational, we’ve taken ecommerce sites from like 8k in revenue monthly to over 100k for a lot less (5k- 10k a month for a few years)
-
SEO is like working freelance for search engine companies. You look at their query statistics, and you start producing answers to the popular and yet unanswered questions.
After a while the answers you’ve provided are reproduced in other reputable sites. Once that happens, the answers become universal knowledge. They get incorporated in the knowledge database. This means no more traffic to you, since the answers are now given within the SERPs.
Thus you need to figure out new questions to answer better than anyone else.
This dance is very costly for you, so you need to optimize your business in the hope of breaking even or even make a small profit for a couple of months every year.
-
Hoenstly, without insight into what you’re needs are, it’s impossible to say what that budget is doing for you or how it could be better utilized.
My POV (disclaimer: full-time affiliate markter/SEO since 2005, SEO agency owner, large content site GM):
* **$20k/mo to support a heavy-hitting content/SEO campaign for a SaaS or Ecom company seems about right**
* ~$5k/mo dedicated for backlinks (I’d expect to see 12ish good-quality links at that price)
* $10k/mo for content creation (2-3x short-form videos, 6-10x blog articles)
* ~$5k/mo for technical SEO and project management
* **$20k to support a large multi-location SMB business seems about right**
* ~$10K/MO dedicated to local link building/citations (I’d expect to see around 15 good-quality *local links* for that money)
* $5k/mo content creation (1-2 short-form videos, 2-5 blog posts)
* ~$5k/mo for technical SEO and project management
* **$20K to support a content site/network seems about right**
* $5k/mo link building
* $7.5k/mo content creation
* $5k/mo technical analysis
* $2.5k/mo project management/reportingThe above give ideas on how I would break down budget depending on site/business model.
None of the above includes CRO/UX work, though it could. $20k is a flexible budget and if you didn’t need as much content/links, you could easily direct a good budget toward CRO and UX.
Regardless, a massive chunk of that $20k supports multi-channel content creation. All three of the above examples would tackle Google organic + YouTube simultaneously.
If you’re spending $20k and your scope of work deviates heavily from the above, I’m genuinely curious how, where, and why.
-
There are some terrible answers in this thread. How someone can say you are getting ripped off or spending too much while knowing nothing other than how much you are spending is beyond me. It just shows the general level of incompetence of most people who claim to be SEOs.
You very well may be getting a raw deal at $20k/month. You also might not be spending nearly enough to hit your company’s goals.
The one thing from your story that does concern me is it sounds like there is not appropriate tracking set up for conversions and the progress of the project. You should be able to tell pretty easily if how much you have spent has been worth it or not. That should have been one of the first things the company helped insure was set up properly.
-
I have an Agency and we provide 20 to 30 high quality articles per month, handle the entire backlink outreach process (technical setup of emails, email deliverability, etc. everything is handled by us) along with regular technical audits + issue fixes.
Furthermore, we establish a 90 day metric to hit with the client, where there’s a 100% money back guarantee if the metric is not hit. Along with that, we guarantee a minimum amount of traffic in 12 months of working with us. If for some reason, we don’t quite hit it, we work for free until they hit the results. I’m sure no one else does this in the SEO space. In terms of credibility, we’ve helped clients go from 1M to 4M visits per month in under 18 months.
-
Typically SEO starts at 10% of pretext revenue earned. Your business should be generating around 2.88 million annually. I would hire a in house specialist if you plan on growing your business. There are many trash SEO companies out there. For that kind of money most companies would be willing to come up with a plan. Depending on what your business does or what your product/service is will also affect what your doing.
Log in to reply.