How Much Should Businesses Spend on SEO in 2023?

May 8, 2023

Karl Finnbogason

Karl has been working in the marketing industry for the past 10 years and has worked with some of the largest businesses in the world

If you’re considering adding SEO to your digital marketing strategy, you must also consider the cost. The good news is that there’s a range that can fit into your budget once you determine your business needs, goals, and timeline. This blog post will discuss how much businesses should spend on SEO in 2023 and what they should expect from quality work.

Spending Wisely: Should You DIY SEO?

While building your in-house team might be tempting, it may not always be cost-effective. SEO work requires a team of specialists, and building the infrastructure can be costly. Hiring an SEO agency is often the most cost-effective solution. The cost of SEO that delivers meaningful results varies based on the industry, goals, and speed.

The Building Blocks Of A Winning SEO Campaign

Before allocating your marketing spend, you must understand the essential elements of SEO and how each piece fits into the larger puzzle. Here are a few SEO pillars that can drive growth for your brand:

Off-Page and Link Building are Vital to Long-Term Results: Optimizing your brand’s online presence and performance requires a healthy and robust backlink profile. A qualified SEO agency will pair the keywords you want to rank for with your most important landing pages and create high-quality content featuring those links.
Use On-Page Best Practices to Enhance Your Site: On-page SEO encompasses all the steps you can take to improve your site for a better user experience. This includes publishing world-class content designed to educate and inform the reader, optimizing title tags, and crafting compelling meta descriptions.
Get Technical to Boost SEO Performance: Technical SEO includes the technical aspects of your site that impact its overall performance. This includes mobile-friendliness, page speed, and other ranking factors.
Create Original, Helpful Content to Drive Growth: Google is reinventing itself as a discovery engine, and your content needs to be optimized for discovery and conversion. A successful content strategy is essential to bringing more users into your acquisition funnels.

The Cost of SEO

The cost of SEO can span a wide range, from about a thousand dollars to tens of thousands per month, depending on your needs. Here are some factors that determine the cost of SEO:

Industry: If your business is entering a new market or part of a brand-new industry, SEO has to work harder to meet your goals.
Services: The whole package, including on-site optimization, search engine marketing, PPC, link building, etc., will be more expensive than a few selected services.
Timeline: The faster you want to reach your goals, the more you’ll have to pay.

While SEO costs vary, every successful campaign should have at least some combination of link building, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and content marketing.

In the long-term SEO really gets the best Return On Investment for businesses. We have worked with clients that are getting anywhere from 5-15 times ROI so for every $1000 they spend, they get back $5000-15000 in increased revenue. Not many other marketing channels can offer that type of ROI which is why SEO is so important, especially today when competition has never been higher.

Final Thoughts

SEO is an essential part of digital marketing, and the cost varies depending on your needs, goals, and timeline. Hiring an SEO agency is often more cost-effective than building an in-house team. To get the most out of your marketing budget, allocate it wisely and ensure that your SEO campaign includes the essential elements of SEO.