What type of results should you be getting in your Search Engine Marketing efforts? How much money should I spend on Google Ads? Or in Facebook? What would it cost to hire someone to help me?
Video Transcript
Hey y’all! Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, and I’m excited to wrap up the three-part series we’ve been doing the last couple of weeks now, on search engine marketing, search engine optimization.
So listen, what we looked at already, the first week we talked about, paid opportunities and what that looks like. The second week, we talked about organic or a natural way of building your website to get it to rank high, and this week, I kind of wanna address both of them and give you a clear understanding of what your expectations should be depending upon which route you wanna take. So I want you to think about this. Again, there’s only two ways to be find on Google, right, we’ve already covered this. It’s either paid, you either pay for ad placement or you build your website in such a way that Google clearly understands what it is that your website’s about or what it is that you do, and they like your content so much. They understand your content. They see that users like your content, and they’ll ultimately start to rank you higher, and higher and higher and reward you in a sense, for that page one ranking. So let’s look at both of those opportunities this week.
Let’s talk about expectations and let’s look at some budgets. Alright, this might not be your most favorite topic, but it’s something you clearly have to understand. Because while we keep hearing so much over these last five, 10 years about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, unfortunately, there’s still this really weird idea that SEO just turns on a faucet of leads, and if you just waive your magic wand, and sprinkle some SEM dust on things, that magic is gonna happen and you’re gonna rank page one.
Some people think that if I have a budget of $500, that automatically I’m gonna be on page one. So let’s get into some reality. Okay, let’s talk about what that looks like. I’m gonna share my screen with you, and let’s walk through some things. So specifically Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. Okay the results for search engine marketing, truly depends on your industry. You wanna think about okay, what kind of industry are you in? Are you in a doctor’s office? Are you in a law firm? Are you in an industry that’s very aggressive and you have a lot of competition happening, and if you do, then you’re probably gonna have to plan to either pay more, if you’re going the paid option, or be very aggressive when it comes to your organic strategy. Okay, you’ve gotta have a plan for those.
The other thing, it depends on what target words you wanna go after. So again, how many keywords are you trying to rank for? How saturated are those fields? How expensive are those keywords inside of ads? Are your competitors paying $12.00 a click, $30.00 a click? What are they paying for and how will you have to adjust your budget to outrank them? And then search engine marketing any type, whether it’s paid or organic, certainly depends on the results that you think you want.
So what I don’t want you to do is call up an SEO company and tell ’em, “Hey, I’ve got 500 bucks to spend. “Hey, I’ve got $2,000 a month to spend.”, and think automatically that, that means that you’re gonna get back $200,000 in sales. I really want you to have a very clear understanding of what type of results you should be getting back for the budget you’re either monetarily spending or the budget of time, that you’re trying to allocate for your organic approach to marketing. So, when you’re thinking about the results, you wanna think about okay, well I want to get 10 leads a week. If I could get 10 great leads a week, I would be set. If I could get a hundred leads a month, this would be outstanding. You have to think about what type of results you want, and then almost in a sense reverse engineer it. Go backwards then and think, okay then:
- how do I get that many leads?
- does it take a thousand visitors to convert to those 10 leads?
- what does that look like?
All of that kind of plays into how aggressive you either have to spend your money or how aggressive you have to have a content strategy for organic approach. And then it also depends on who’s managing all of this.
- So who’s created the content?
- Who’s writing it all out?
- Who’s creating the ads, and monitoring the ads every single week?
- Who’s going out there and doing the data analysis trying to figure out who your actual audience is?
You know, if you’re gonna hire a company, you definitely are gonna have to budget for that. And it certainly is, a lot of times, you get what you pay for. So let’s keep goin’. We’re gonna talk about specifically then about what types of budgets you should have. Now I’m gonna just say a little bit of fine print here. These are just examples. Again, this is all going to vary on your industry. It’s gonna vary on the keywords that you’re going after. So if you’re in a saturated field, these numbers might be way too low, and you’re gonna have to stay at budget a lot higher.
If you’re in kind of a niche industry, then maybe you’ll be able to spend a budget comparable to this. So we’re gonna talk first about a DIY approach. So this is doing it yourself, from your home office, from your office space, wherever you’re sitting there at the computer. You’re doing all the heavy lifting. You’re figuring out how to do ads. You’re figuring out Google AdWords. You’re figuring out Facebook insights and Facebook ads. You’re doing it all. If you have a budget for less than $500 a month, then I would suggest you spending that solely inside of Facebook, if that’s where your target market lives. One of the reasons why I say that is because a dollar seems to stretch a lot farther inside of Facebook. Specifically if you’re able to really niche down your target audience, and set those demographics, as you’re creating the ad.
If you have a budget between $501 and maybe $1,200 or so, you can probably move into the Google ad spend arena, and start to see some mediocre results coming from that. Certainly again, don’t think that just spending that type of money is gonna result in 30, 50, 80,000 dollars in sales, because that’s not necessarily reality unless you truly, truly, truly hustle and really start to understand the game in a sense of Google AdWords. And then, of course, if you have a higher-end budget, you can go across the different channels. You can advertise inside of Facebook, and Google AdWords, and Bing. You can go over and do some advertising inside of Instagram. You can have more opportunities if your budget is just a little bit higher end. So that keep that in mind. Again, thinking about the types of results you want.
I want you to think about this though, that dollar amount is per key phrase. I’m just gonna say that because what I don’t want you to think is, well I can go out and spend $1,200 and get 40 keywords conquered. Okay, that’s just not reality. I can go out and spend $1,200 and even get three keywords. I don’t know if that’s really reality. It all depends again, back on doing your keyword research to figure out how aggressively those keywords are being approached by your industry. So, this again, does not include hiring company. That is the DIY approach, right.
So if you’re looking a hiring a company to maybe manage, you might wanna add to that expense, right there, about $2,000 a month to get a company, a real professional company who does white hat SEO, to manage all that for you. So let’s talk a little bit now about organic approach. The thing about organic to me, one of the things I love about organic is that it’s more of a sustainable strategy, and what I mean by that is this. It might take you longer, to get to page one. You know, paid options, your ads appear within hours, your ads are up and running. So you could potentially be getting leads that quickly.
Organic as I spoke about last week, certainly takes us longer, to get that momentum going, but once you are rewarded with that page one ranking, it’s pretty difficult to get knocked off of that page one. So it’s exciting to know that, that’s more sustainable long-term. But, you have to have a strategy for strong consistent content. You’ve really gotta understand how to make fresh, original engaging content, that Google and your visitors are gonna absolutely love. So think about that as you’re looking at the option of organic.
The other thing you have to do consistently, almost religiously, for that matter, is gonna be social media marketing. You have to, have to, have to engage. You cannot have a strategy for organic approach, and refuse to be on Facebook, or refuse to use Twitter, or refuse… Now you don’t have to be on all of them, but you need at least have one that you know, listen, I know how to use that network. I’m confident. I know how to use hashtags. I can do this. You definitely wanna think about that. Because overall, and this is what I wanna end on, search engine marketing is a full-time job. That’s the truth of it. If you think you can call up a company and spend $300 a month, and that’s a lot of money to you in your marketing budget, and you’re expecting them to just deliver the world, you’re not really living in a realistic expectation relationship with that company, or that company is doing a lot of black hat tricks, to try to get you amazing results, which you don’t want either.
You wanna have a very transparent relationship with any company you’re working with and you certainly need to understand it yourself if you’re trying to do, the do-it-yourself approach. So, think about this. If you wanna go out and do this all by yourself, in order to get the really great results, you’re gonna have to become an SEO expert, and truly, truly, understand search engine optimization, search engine marketing.
You’re gonna probably need some video and some photo editing skills. You’ll probably need to understand how to create really amazing ads, and you’ll need to be a copywriter as well, so that you understand calls to action, and the psychology behind imagery, and color theory even.
You’ll probably need to become almost a Google Analytics expert. You’ll have to really understand how to monitor your organic traffic as well as your pay traffic, and learn how to overlap them. So, hopefully, improve on your budget spend, and lessen that cost.
And you’ll probably wanna go ahead and be Google Adwords Certified, Bing Certified, you know, all those certifications out there.
If you were to go ahead and hire somebody like that, in the State of Texas, you’re probably looking to pay them, around $4,000, $5,000 a month, to bring them on to a full-time gig, to focus solely on your company. So please don’t think that you can go out there then, and by the way, that doesn’t include any money spent on ads. That’s just to hire somebody to be working on this consistently for you, to get the type of aggressive results you want. The only other way around this you guys is to either do it yourself, or to minimize your expectations, knowing that ultimately, you should start to see some results, but certainly search engine optimization, and search engine marketing is not a magic wand, that just opens up the floodgates and has customers lining up to you.
It’s a process that you really truly need to understand yourself so that you can hold a company accountable if they’re doing it for you, or so that you can do it for yourself.
Alright, I hope that kind of helps bring some of this into a little bit more of a tangible, relatable topic for you. If you have questions, put them in the comment box below. I know this was a longer video than I normally do, but you guys, this is a really important topic, that I think a lot of people have misunderstandings on.
We’re going to be doing this all over again next week, talkin’ about all sorts of cool WordPress stuff. So stick around, be sure to subscribe to our channel, and I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye y’all!
Here are some other videos/resources that you can take a look.
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- Part 1 – Paid Marketing
- Part 2 – Organic SEO
- More on SEO
