Once you know the facts deciding how much you should budget to pay for an SEO to help you grow your finance website can be much simpler.
Whatever the size and number of customers you have or the niche you’re in you can help determine a budget that suits you best based on what your goals are and what you’d like to achieve, the experience and size of your team and how quickly you’d like to see results.
Here are some of the most important determining factors to consider when deciding what you want from an SEO and the strategy.
What Your Goals Are
Goals and what you want to achieve with your business website are the most important factor in determining your SEO budget.
If you’re aiming for rapid growth, with an SEO project designed to help you build growth for your business as quickly as possible, then you’re going to have to apportion a higher budget to your SEO endeavours.
SEO isn’t cheap for many reasons, including;
- it takes time, this isn’t to say you can’t see and get results quickly but the actual doing of the work, researching, planning and executing as well as creating a strategy, takes considerable time – especially if you want to guarantee success.
- it is costly, cracking established, high value search results pages is expensive. The brands and businesses ranking there don’t get there by accident. Most have invested in brand or defined search strategies to help earn their place on page 1 results. If you want to rank there then higher budgets can equal faster results
- it is nuanced, with SEO, there’s not just one lever to pull or one defined set of rules to follow, especially when you consider how different each website, even in the same niche, can be. There are a defined set of rules to follow but how you go about approaching and succeeding in each of these roles is playable.
- it is always moving, while you’re moving forward, your competitors are too. If you want to get to the top, you not only need to understand how your competitors operate and what strategies they’re using but also you’ll need to beat them too.
By defining your goals early and discussing them with your SEO or potential SEO consultants that you’re speaking with, you’ll be able to help develop a much clearer picture for them of how quickly work needs to be done, what growth trajectory you’re aiming for and how much time they’ll need to commit to your project based on this.
Fintech brands very often have high growth ambitions, here is how a well executed finance SEO strategy can help accelerate your growth plans.
Your Team and Their Involvement & Experience
The size and experience levels of your team matters a great deal for your SEO projects.
If you have a large team dedicated to web optimisations for your business which includes; experienced writers, PR managers, spokespeople and data experts then your costs could be lower because your SEO will be able to draw upon the experience of these teams and their personnel to help sculpt a winning SEO strategy.
For example, an SEO that can co-ordinate their keyword research with a content writer to develop a content hub to cover a critical topic within your financial space, while advising on a PR strategy to help outreach selected content pieces to certain press teams and news organisations while developing expert commentary alongside an expert spokesperson plus developing a “what good looks like” for the content and press coverage reports with the data expert, will be generating much more value and return on your investment in their skills than an SEO that doesn’t have this support or expertise to draw upon.
If you’re a small team, without access to additional resource or team members that can help with development of strategy, then make sure, when speaking to SEO’s that you’re considering working with, that they have relevant experience of working in all of the above fields and have similar project experience to help them explain processes to you.
Even more crucially, if they don’t have the relevant experience of all of these fields, they should help you to understand this so you can determine how and where to prioritise recruiting additional resource to help make the project successful.
If you’re looking for content and technical SEO only, then considering the above is less critical to your selection process and discussing past SEO projects where your potential SEOs have made differences to sites using technical optimisations and content strategies to help bring in additional financial website traffic.
Your Revenue & Profit
SEO can help you grow website traffic, grow visibility of your brand in search results, make your brand more recognisable and help solve problems for users of your software or service. However, if you want to realise the full potential value of SEO activity, your efforts should be focused on growing revenue and profit for financial services clients and generating leads and clients for financial advisors.
Here is how SEO works for financial advisors.
i.e. you should expect to see a clear return on your investment after months or years of working with your SEO specialist.
Ultimately, your SEO consultant will need insights into your current revenue performance, how you create and generate leads currently, what methods have worked so far and how you’re going to ensure the additional demand they generate is successfully converted into profit.
Understanding profitability and priority growth areas for your business will also be key in helping you to gain the biggest and fastest growth on your investment in their services. It’s no use them pursuing tax planning clients if your prime source of profitable activity and priority space you’re looking to grow into is in client investments and pensions.
Being transparent on both what the company generates and which product types generate the most profits is some of the most useful data you can share with your SEO because it will help inform their competitor research, content strategy, link acquisition plans and help them prioritise technical and existing website issues to fix.
If your revenue is high, your SEO will likely charge more, because your site stands to benefit more from increased numbers of sales, clients and leads.
If your revenue is lower, your site is newer, or your profits are very low, your SEO may be willing to offer a lower priced service covering the basics initially, then increase budgets as workloads increase and you begin seeing an increase on performance in areas critical to your business.
Most SEOs will have a floor, a price they will be unwilling to work at, so if your budget falls below this, you may be better off with a more generalised marketer or a more junior SEO.
At the same time, most good SEOs can be flexible with pricing if there’s a longer term agreement available and there’s enough ongoing work available for them to block a significant chunk of time out for.
How quickly you Want to See Results
SEO is often termed a “long term investment” indicating it takes a long time to yield results. Depending on the nuances of the situation this can, in many cases, be true however there are many ways that SEO can be accelerated so that results occur faster and tasks get executed on more rapidly.
If your budget is very high, your SEO may be willing to commit a number of focused, consistent weeks to the project to help improve the organic performance of your website as quickly as they possibly can. However, you will need to guarantee sizeable budgets, commitments from wider teams to help focus on and execute the recommendations of your SEO expert and as much supporting resource as they need.
SEO is getting closer to being pay to win, so larger budgets can help to get things done more quickly and can help your organic search specialist execute more rapidly. For example, larger budgets can help your SEO by;
- allowing your SEO to commit more time to your project – a large enough budget could buy the full time focus of your SEO specialist for three or four weeks of the initial project (or longer if you have enough of budget available).
- accelerate authority – if you have enough budget available, anything is possible to help you gain authority quickly. Some of the best, traditional SEO methods of gaining links are slower, lower cost and tend to offer high quality results but if you want to move quickly and prefer speed over quality, then there are many rapid options available for gaining authority into your site faster.
Rapid authority methods are high cost, high risk and not guaranteed to produce the most targeted results, but can produce results quickly if this is the priority.
- accelerate content production – similar to growing authority in your domain, creating and publishing SEO optimised content is easier and faster than than ever. With enough budget and a relaxed attitude to the risk, your SEO can help you create an optimised SEO quickly and easily using the latest tools. an services for content production.
The above methods are known in the industry as “growth hacking” and can yield impressive results if managed correctly.
We can help you with your growth hacking needs if you prefer rapid result delivery over sustainable business growth through our high quality approach to SEO.
How Long you Want to Engage for
If you have a longterm view and consider SEO as critical to thegrowth of your business over time, then you should mention this to SEO specialists that you engage with.
Most experienced SEO professionals will agree and understand that the true value of their work is unlocked as time elapses.
For SEO specialists, an agreement that offers them consistent work over coming months or year will be more valuable to them rather than single days of work here and there which offer little to no ongoing understanding of your business, it’s goals what is working now or insights into where and how you’d like the business grow.
When talking to SEO consultants you’re interested in working with, talk to them about the contract terms they offer, establish whether they’re willing and able to offer discounts for longer term working relationships that can help them generate consistent income overtime.
You might be pleasantly surprised as to how many freelances will offer you a discounted rate if you can guarantee them a large number of hours each month.
How Much Should You Pay?
Ultimately, how much you want to pay and how much you should pay for SEO for your financial services business is up to you.
You’ll be able to find an SEO consultant to work alongside you on your website whether you’ve budgeted £100 per hour or £20. Bear in mind that, good, effective and long lasting SEO, which provides value for the long term takes time, so although you may feel like you’re getting great value by securing an SEO to work on your website for the lowest price, the work output will also, likely be very low quality.
You should remember that, there is very often as much to lose as there is to gain from SEO being executed poorly or from website changes which can lead to declining traffic or fewer leads and sales.
The best way to calculate and create a budget that your happy paying for SEO is to consider your annual profit and turnover, calculate how much additional value increased traffic volumes or conversions would help to generate for your business and then use this to calculate your total budget for SEO improvements.
When you have a total, portion this out over the SEO activity you’d like carried out on your website such as:
- Authority building
- Content production
- Technical SEO
- Onsite fixes and optimisations
- Strategic planning and roadmapping
You can then divide the total budget over the priorities you have to work on and decide how much of your budget will be made available to your SEO specialist, how much you’ll reserve for tools or how much you’ll need to pay other freelancers like content writers, designers and web developers.
We’d recommend checking out our SEO cost calculator too, select finance and the number of pages on your site to see an estimate of the price you’ll pay.
Ultimately, the price you pay for SEO is largely down to what you choose. If you were looking for a figure, I’d suggest budgeting between 0.5% and 1.5% of annual turnover towards your SEO budget.
Work With Us
We’re expert organic search specialists, with specific experience working as an enterprise SEO consultant for many well known brands, working in SEO for financial services and helping financial clients grow website traffic, acquire and retain clients and customers and developing SEO strategies to help businesses sell to investors.
by Ben Ullmer
