How to Invest in SEO

It’s relatively simple to experiment with a new paid marketing channel. You may rapidly quantify the return on your investment by assigning someone in-house, allocating some test budget, and fast quantifying the return on your investment.

Moz
29-10-2021

Examining SEO can be a little trickier:

Often, results take time to manifest (more than six months)

When results do emerge, they are frequently difficult to measure or attribute to any particular effort.

It’s usually more than a financial investment – you’ll also require product resources.

While there are exceptions, the majority of businesses are unable to say, “Let’s invest $10,000 on SEO over the next few months and see if there is any promise there.” You must take a leap of faith, and weighing that leap against very tangible, much more immediate projects is not always straightforward.

I witnessed this issue firsthand when working as a consultant at Distilled and later in-house at Etsy, SeatGeek, and now Course Hero. Thus, here is my attempt at a structure for SEO investment:

Should you invest in SEO at all?
How much time and money should you invest in SEO?
How should your SEO investment be structured?
How should your SEO investment be quantified?

This post will not discuss if SEO work is valuable, how to develop an effective SEO plan, how to hire the correct SEO, or which tools to employ. These are all aspects of investing in SEO that are highly context-dependent. Having said that, I hope this framework assists you in navigating such questions.

Should you invest in SEO at all?

The critical question here is: What is the size of the addressable search market? A company like Slack will have a modest addressable search market (there aren’t that many searches for which Slack cares), but Expedia will have a massive addressable search market (flights from Vancouver to Toronto or Montreal or Calgary, hotels with free breakfast in Vancouver, cheap motels in Vancouver, car rentals in Vancouver, etc.).

Slack could always go all-in on content marketing and attempt to rank for top-of-funnel keywords (for example, anything connected to communication), but the intent of this traffic is typically low.

Each business has the ability to target a broad range of top-of-funnel queries. For instance, Away may write about travel tips, Warby Parker about eye health, Workday about hiring, and so on. However, this type of traffic is rarely transactional and hence has a lesser value (though not worthless).

The simplest way to determine the size of your addressable search market is to conduct a competition analysis using a program such as Moz, SEMrush, or SimilarWeb. To illustrate, if I were at Tuft & Needle, I would do the following:

Utilize Moz’s True Competitor tool to identify organic search competitors.

2. Using Similarweb or SEMrush, determine the non-branded search traffic of those competitors.

Visits to non-branded SEO sites on an annual basis (millions)

Non-branded visits are those that do not include the brand name (e.g. Casper). Casper, for example, receives 8.5 million visitors each year from branded queries, but this data offers little insight into your own search opportunities (though could be interesting from a brand perspective).

Internally (how much is a search visit worth to you?) or externally (using a tool like SEMrush) value these visits:

Using sleepfoundation.org as the largest rival in the competitive set above, we can see that purchasing their monthly SEO traffic via search advertisements will cost an estimated $10.9 million per month or $2.14 per visit ($10.9/5.1).

As a result of examining these five competitors, we may deduce the following:

Annually, approximately 100 million search visits are expected to be somewhat relevant to Tuft & Needle (the sum of search traffic to the five competitors).
Each visit could cost as little as $2.14.
Tuft & Needle’s overall search traffic value might be in the neighborhood of $214 million per year (100 million * $2.14).

The preceding activity should assist you in deciding:

Is SEO worth the first investment? While I am undoubtedly biased, the answer to this question will almost always be “yes.” It’s highly improbable that the correct SEO investment will not generate a positive return on investment for the majority of websites. I’d even argue that very few websites have ever over-invested in proper SEO to the point where their ROI dropped into negative territory.
How should our SEO expenditure be prioritized in comparison to other opportunities?
How much should we invest on SEO?

Even if you are convinced that the investment will yield a favorable return on investment, investing in SEO may not make sense if: