Working with an SEO reseller is a great way to outsource your SEO campaign if you don’t have the resources to do it in-house. A big question we see from SEO resellers, however, is what should my budget be? How much should I spend? Budgeting can be a very daunting task when you are outsourcing to a white label SEO reseller, and there are several things you should consider when deciding how much you are going to spend on a SEO campaign. We would like to take some time to help you get started with this, so join us in today’s Daily Brown Bag as we review six tips on establishing a budget with your SEO reseller.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today, we're talking about six budget tips for your SEO reseller. I'm Chad Hill, and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Hi. Good afternoon, Chad. This is a great topic for our Brown Bag today. We get a lot of SEO reseller requests, as you can imagine, wanting to know, "How much should I spend? What should my budget be?" Budgeting is, in fact, one of the biggest challenges when working with an outsourced SEO reseller partner. And you've got to remember that one big reason the businesses have chosen to outsource SEO to you, is because they don't have the resources to do this in-house. They're working with very small budgets. They're turning to you. You've outsourced to a white label provider. But you've got to watch out for those expectations because sometimes small budgets come with very large expectations. We see this every day.
So, how do we ground this in a few numbers, Chad? And then we'll get to our list. Well, an online marketing trend survey revealed that most small businesses have a search marketing budget of between $500 to $1,500 per month, and they choose to spend most of that on website development and SEO. So if the end-client is spending between $500 to $1,500, you're working with an SEO reselling organization, your mark-up is probably about 100%. It gives you a flavor of what you can keep to cover your cost of acquisition and account management and what should go through to your partner. Now, let's talk about those tips and how to really stretch those dollars so you get maximum return for your client.
6 Tips to Establishing a Budget With Your SEO Reseller:
1. Realize that SEO is a long-term commitment.
Well, number one on our list: realize that SEO is a long-term commitment. If you want immediate results, Chad, we say this every day, "You should do something else." People come in all the time, "I'm going to spend this money on SEO, but I've got to see it work immediately." And we just turn that business away. That's bad business. You need to understand, general rule of thumb, people say, it's four to six months before you'll start seeing some results, six to twelve months before anything more complete and exciting. And some keywords, you can be working on them for years, four to five years. It really depends on how competitive it is.
2. Know what you're trying to accomplish by working with an SEO reseller.
So, again, some of those goals might be increasing sales. Some of them might be improving brand recognition which, in and of itself probably has different ways to measure; increasing traffic to your site and then having, for example, your blog get picked up or referenced by other publications. So those are all different expectations or goals you might set. You need to make sure you are very clear about what you're measuring upfront. Number three: know where you're starting. This is a big one. Take a look at the site for the client that you're working with. How old is it? What's the domain authority? Has any work been done on it? I mean, we see sites come in here with a domain authority of zero and yet, they have some very lofty expectations for keyword rankings and traffic. We know that's going to be a disaster. You've got to manage those expectations down. Other clients come in with a very strong site, just hasn't been worked on, hasn't been tuned and hasn't had an appropriate link-building effort or content marketing effort. We know we can move those things. You want to get pretty good at sizing this up because there's a very direct relationship between where that site's starting, the budget you need to get from the client and the expectations you're going to set and how long you're going to keep that client. Do they have a blog? Are they into content marketing? Do they even understand what that is? Have they done it previously? And how does the site you're working on stack up against the competition? Again, in a very important, competitive field, if you're up against some very, very well-funded, big players, you're going to have a hard time moving things. So always know where you're starting. Number four is know what you need from your SEO reseller, and what you will handle in-house. Is this really important? There are certain things that you might want to outsource, and some things that you want to keep in-house. And there are obviously some things that are hard to do that you want to outsource. In other cases, there are things that, for example, that require more interaction with the client and those are the things you might want to keep in-house, but define that upfront. Be very clear, again, in terms of setting expectations, looking at the deliverables that your SEO re-seller is going to handle and then that way you, again, won't have any miscommunications. Number five: Establish measurable goals. This is Project Management: 101 but it's amazing Chad, how many folks we see that just don't have this. And then they get in this weird loop where they don't want to call their client because they're thinking no news is good news, and if they call, it just might provoke them into thinking something bad. That just doesn't work. You need to be proactive. You need to be asking them questions about "What you hope to get out of this program?" You want to hear them say things like, "I want to increase traffic by 10%. I want to increase overall conversion by 20%." You want to put some time frames on these and you want to remember that your project, even if you're focusing on the SEO piece of it, is more than just rankings. You're only doing this to get them business. If they're making money, they're getting leads, they're going to keep investing in this and probably increase the amount of money they will budget to give you. But you're not going to have that kind of trust and long-term relationship if you don't establish solid goals and show them excellent project management tracking towards those goals, being very upfront and trustworthy even when things aren't going well, especially when things aren't going well. Own it. Talk to them and show them what you're going to do about it, you'll get things back on track. The last one, number six, is be realistic and we can't emphasize this enough. Upfront, you want to say if you can't afford the proposal or the services that you need to deliver the results that maybe the client's looking for. It's way better to identify that upfront than to say, "Let's wait six months," and then prove out that you couldn't actually get what needed to get done. So, a lot of times that means if there's a fixed budget, you're going to need to go back and look at some of the keywords and look at the objectives to see if there might need to be some tweaks. Sometimes that may be as simple as mixing in some easier keywords with more competitive keywords. In other cases, it might mean scrapping every keyword you found and starting over again. So, always make sure that you look at that. You want to also...remember, you get what you pay for. So, sometimes, there are a lot of people in the SEO business that build their products based on just a long list of deliverables, but they're not at the quality the end-client's expecting and ultimately, they may not deliver the results you need. So, be very realistic and of course, good work always is going to cost money. Excellent. Well, six budget tips for your SEO reseller. We hope this information has been really helpful for you today. If you like this video, we would ask that you subscribe. We've got lots of other material on the website. And if you're still really confused and you want to pick up the phone and talk to someone, give us a call. Come to our 4:00 p.m. Q&A session, we'd be happy to chat it over with you.
3. Know where you're starting.
4. Know what you need from your SEO reseller, and what you will handle in-house.
5. Establish measurable goals.
6. Be realistic.
