Many business owners know that they need SEO to improve their online sales, but they often struggle with determining the right budget for SEO campaign. In fact, it’s believed that only half of the small businesses have SEO budget and many of them have very limited budget at just $100 per month. It’s quite unfortunate that many business owners don’t really know the inner workings of SEO. They are busy with core business operations and consider SEO as just supporting activities. Other business owners are easily swayed by “cheap and guaranteed first-page results” offers in their email.

There are many people with limited SEO skills posing as SEO professionals. They may help you to rank at top positions, but for obscure long tail keywords that attract very little traffic. Cheap SEO services can be very damaging, if they use questionable methods, such as link schemes that are risky to clients. In this situation, business owners are not only throwing their money away, but also damaging their websites. If the damage is serious enough, penalty from Google can virtually wipe out the visibility of the website. Business owners need to see SEO as a long-term effort and allocate enough budget.

Before developing your budget, you need to determine the right strategy. Using this strategy, you create an action plan and make the necessary budget to carry out the details inside the action plan. There are many questions that you need to answer, such as whether your backlink profile, content, website infrastructure and navigation pathways stack up against your competitors. Your website condition and the level of competition determine the level of work and consequently your budget. For more competitive keywords, you will need to have content with higher quality and more inbound links to rank higher in search results.

If you do things effectively, higher budget makes it more likely for you to achieve success. But, no matter how big your budget is, it may mean little if you have the wrong strategy and plan of actions. So, you need to take time to properly set up a strategy and plan of actions.  If you hire a reputable SEO company, you may need to pay about $500 a month. For an international campaign and a moderately competitive keyword, you may need a minimum budget of $5,000 a month. For a highly competitive keyword, businesses may need to spend about $10,000 per month.

In order to reduce risks, you should ask whether the SEO service has a trial package with no contract and reduced price. This should be a great opportunity for you to minimize risks. In reality, some straightforward improvements can significantly boost your organic traffic. As an example, keyword optimization and proper content development will deliver information that your audience need. If you have plenty of such articles, people will continue to come and expect more in the future. Google will recognize your efforts and reward them. Organic traffic from good SEO development is the most consistent and it’s also the most converting of all.