Online merchants are well aware of the fact that search engine optimization is necessary to make their business successful. However, they think hiring an SEO firm or a freelance SEO Expert Cais enough to ensure success. What they fail to understand is that proper strategy planning and budget allotment are required to achieve the desired results. Since you are a valuable client, any professional SEO company will do their work, but unless you know what you should expect and how much time are required for the ROI, you will unnecessarily start arguing with the service provider. Before we focus on how a business owner should plan SEO goals, let me give you a basic idea about search engine optimization.
# It is a long time process: Search engine optimization is a complicated process and takes time to show any positive results. You can’t expect that your site will pop up in the top 20 results after 3 months. It takes minimum 4-6 months to get any result and one year to see convincing output. In fact, your actual ROI starts from the second year. SEO takes time mainly due to two reasons. First, the SEO firm devotes time on customer research and content creation to get the attention of search engines. Second, as there are too many sites, search engines take time to judge the true value of your site before giving it a good spot on SERP.
# Cheap SEO is a wrong concept: When you hire a reputed SEO company, they will charge thousands of dollars per month for their services. You should be ready to pay minimum USD 3000-USD 5000 per month for comprehensive search engine optimization services. So, before you think about hiring a SEO agency, make sure that you have enough money to continue the SEO campaign.
Now, let’s concentrate on SEO planning.
- Decide a metric: As a business owner who is spending thousands of dollars every month, you must decide what you are going to measure and more importantly, why you want to measure it. Most entrepreneurs will say “ranking’, but think carefully, ranking matters or customers matter? Instead of focusing on ranking, you should check the rates of incoming traffic, leads and conversions.
- Select a target: Suppose you have decided sales as a metric. Now, how much increase do you want to see in your sales figures? For example, is your target 10% sales growth every month? Then make it clear to the SEO firm so that they can work accordingly.
- Decide the price to achieve your target: Ask the SEO firm how much do you need to invest in the SEO campaign to reach your sales target.
- Fix the budget: Once you know how much you need to pay for achieving your target, you can decide your budget and calculate the ROI. For example, $4000 per month for 12 months means you are spending $48000. So, your ROI should be greater than $48000.
Always hire an experienced and reputed SEO company for search engine optimization. Google is regularly releasing algorithm updates to punish black hat SEO techniques and only a team of veteran SEO experts can help your site acquire top rank by implementing latest white hat SEO strategies.
