SEO vs Paid Channel – When Money is tight
Budgeting for e-commerce acquisition and marketing is sometimes a little bit too easy: Google Shopping, Facebook Ads, done. As soon as you get a positive ROAS on paid traffic you try to scale it and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Of course you know it’s not forever and you would really love some “owned” channels to rely on. But you’ll do it later. Oh, and some CRO as well.
It’s fairly common for an e-commerce founder or manager to ride the 3 first year of growth on the back of paid channels and build 0 equity in SEO. And starting SEO from 0 on a 3 year old e-commerce is not a nice experience. You basically end up handcuffed to the FANG platforms and they eat most of your margin. Good luck improving your product and fighting Amazon in that situation…
Still, we know it’s hard to divest significant cash flow toward budgeting for organic channels like SEO.
Luckily, this is a very common human problem, and from modest households to accountants it has been solved a long time with a very simple trick. Read along to see how it works…
Ecommerce SEO Budget Breakdown
But wait, isn’t SEO the free traffic anyway?
Yes it is, and of course free traffic can be pretty costly 😀
Like dividends is free money from your expensive stocks, organic traffic from Google search engine is free traffic from your diligent SEO work.
What actually costs money in SEO?
Mainly labor and tools, here is a breakdown:
Technical SEO costs
- audit tools (spiders): from 150 a year to thousands a month
- analysis work (consultant, experts): from 30 to 100+ /hour
- corrections work (devs): from 40 to 100+ /hour
OnSite SEO costs
- audit tools (trackers, analysis): from 0 to hundreds a month
- analysis work (consultant, experts): from 30 to 100+ /hour
- content creation: from 0,05 to 0,5 per word
Off Site SEO costs
- audit tools (databases, analysis): from 30 to hundreds a month
- analysis work (consultant, experts): from 30 to 100+ /hour
- prospection and outreach: from 5 to 30 /hour
- content creation: from 0,05 to 0,5 per word
Given your needs, type of e-commerce or website, maturity and resources you will not have the same cost structure nor do use the same tactics.
SEO Budgeting – The power of the small enveloppes
A lot of modest households have improved their financial situations over decades by using this technique to secure their monthly savings and accrue capital.
It’s been copied by popular business tactics like the famous “Profit-First” book and method.
Personal finance gurus like Ramit Sethi advocate similar approaches.
The envelope technique is very simple:
- create enveloppes for each of your goals
- decide of a percentage of income, even tiny, you will allocate every month toward each of your goals
- every month, when income is received, collect the % amount and put it in each envelope
- once you started accumulating money start spending it toward its goal
- make no exception, be disciplined
- adjust percentage allocation as you go
Of course you don’t need enveloppes to apply this technique to your marketing budget, but the logic is the same. Start with a painless % but be extra disciplined about it. Then increase it gently over time.
For example, if you’re spending 5k every month on ads, you might decide to put 10% of that toward SEO. In the short term those 500 bucks won’t make a difference but:
- SEO is built on consistency
- you will accumulate SEO assets
- you will accumulate SEO data
- your ads spending will keep going up as you grow so your SEO spending will follow, as it’s percentage based
This is a nearly automated way to make sure SEO is not 3 years late on your other channels. Of course once you start seeing encouraging results from your organic channels, you will most probably feel more confident allocating more funds toward it!
That’s the strategy of small wins.
Low budget SEO services – how much to spare?
If you’re spending 50k in ads and decide to allocate 5 or 10% of this amount to SEO you don’t have an issue, this is a decent retainer to start. But let’s say you’re lucky and read this article earlier in your journey, and you’re just spending 5k a month on ads for your e-commerce business.
What the hell are you gonna with a 500 bucks budget? Can you even do anything with such money?
Obviously you won’t get full fledged SEO sprints and audits and consulting and full service retainers with extra backlink creation and what not for that price.
What do with such a low budget then? Go for super low cost and pay $5/h and get deranked in 3 months? Use AI and create run of the mill content? Hire an intern and babysit instead of growing your e-commerce business?
Thankfully you don’t have to resort to such stupid tactics (as you’ve seen a few peers trying it before you know how it ends…).
A great solution is to use quality VAs (virtual assistants), or even better a simple but structured and flexible service that will grow with you.
Yes, the hourly cost will be higher but the quality will be there, and with the right organizational approach the consistent repetition will compound and bring the growth you need over time.
Start SEO next week (without bankrupting your budget)
Decide your percentage, set the money aside and find yourself a good VA or a structured service.
Download or FAQ if you want to learn more about affordable SEO VA packages solutions.