How To Justify And Make A Business Case For SEO Budgets via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

Effective budgeting is crucial not just for planning SEO, providing value to clients, and justifying the spend to achieve it.

It’s also critical for a business to understand SEO budget alongside other marketing budgets to ascertain which platforms are providing the best return on investment (ROI) or the best value in relation to the broader business goals and channel-specific objectives.

Typically, the SEO budget is determined by stakeholders in the business, who will also be responsible for signing off the spend for other marketing channels.

Many marketing channels, such as paid search, fall into the performance marketing category. The ROI and leads generated by those channels are much clearer on a balance sheet compared to the value-add and goals of SEO.

As you justify the SEO budget, it is essential that you distinguish it from the classic paid advertising channels, which many other channels were falling into. It is, in fact, part of a performance marketing strategy, but its objective is not a direct input-output.

You are not paying for clicks.

You are not paying for traffic.

In most cases, you’re paying for consultation expertise and elements (SEO activities) that compound to create a performant organic search presence and, now, a more prominent position and visibility within generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

Another key distinction is that SEO is, for the most part, a longer-term strategy.

Building organic visibility can take time, whereas performance marketing can deliver quicker results based on campaign settings.

This doesn’t mean that SEO cannot provide short-term wins or performance, but building a performance strategy takes time for the most part.

So, you can use many marketing frameworks to effectively fight for your SEO budgets as part of the broader marketing budget.

So, what are the key steps in creating this fighting strategy for your SEO budget?

Segment Your Audience

Firstly, you want to divide your customer base into distinct groups based on demographics, behaviors, needs, and “unmet” needs. Factor in elements of their purchase histories to understand their characteristics.

Once you have your segments in place, you can understand what their journeys look like and how much prior information they have when performing searches or looking to engage with your product online.

This also includes what LLMs and other sources might shape their search journey before eventually narrowing down on a select few products and making that purchase consideration.

Identify High-Value Segments

Once you have your clear segments in your audience, the second phase is to start to identify those that offer four key things:

You should use data to analyze and pinpoint your customer segments with high prospective lifetime value, good purchase frequency, or good profile margin (or a combination of all three).

If you are a luxury clothing brand, people may make less frequent purchases, but those purchases will be very high value.

Therefore, you want your SEO segments to focus on brand retention and loyalty rather than constantly turning to attract new customers who may have a lesser loyalty threshold to their existing chosen brand.

By contrast, would be a brand in the mass cosmetic and skincare industry, in which recent studies have shown that 60% of potential customers are likely to switch brands based on cost.

Here, you want to ensure you are creating positive brand experiences and want to maintain that mental availability.

If this is the case, you want to demonstrate these objectives (and their benefits to the business) when going through your SEO budget.

And as part of your SEO strategy, show how SEO and your value propositions can lend themselves to the broader business objectives of longer-term retention and longer-term ROI from customer groups.

Map Customer Journeys

Once you’ve identified your high-value segments, those you believe will provide the best balance of your investment, you want to start better understanding and mapping that customer journey.

I’ve already touched on this a couple of times, but it’s really about understanding whether these users are going to Google first, as has been the traditional model for over a decade, or whether they are now going to generative AI tools first.

This raises new challenges as to how aware consumers are of your brand or how likely they are to be aware of your specific products, value propositions, and brand promises.

Customer education is evolving, which impacts how they compare your product to others.

Their stage in the journey influences how they engage with your brand and competitors, shaping their timeline to conversion.

The messaging they need will depend on their ability to forecast their experience with your product or service and whether it aligns with their current expectations and needs.

Communicate Business Alignment

When advocating for your budget, you must communicate clear, measurable goals.

Whether these are SMART goals or just arbitrary targets of growth over some time, they need to be there to provide decision-makers some ability to understand, at a very face-value level, what they are getting from the money being invested.

They can serve as a resource to match your business goals. In SEO terms, this could mean increased traffic, but more likely, increased traffic is only desired because traffic increments lead to increments in sales leads, course redemptions, or subscriptions.

Nobody ever really wants traffic just for the sake of having traffic.

KPIs

You can align your budget areas with the business’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and those specific to that SEO marketing channel.

A KPI is a metric that should reflect the overall marketing goals, and these can be anything from conversion rates to customer lifetime values, score rings, and customer acquisition costs.

Determine Budget “Effort” Allocation

A lot of resource allocation can sometimes follow the 70-20-10 rule.

In marketing, the 70-20-10 rule is typically an effort and resource allocation model.

It suggests that you spend 70% of your effort and allocations on proven strategies, 20% on new (but related) ideas, and 10% on high-risk experimental efforts.

Once variables and levers of influence have been identified, you move on to the exploitation phase and start exploiting them as “SEO tactics.”

You need to determine what the best allocation is for your requested budgets, even if you break it down into a fundamental level of a percentage going to research and development, another percentage assigned for tools, another percentage to external content production, and so on.

Breaking it up and providing top-level clarity can help understand that it’s an overall sort of parts and not just a direct spending of one pound/dollar getting a multiplier return on it.

Takeaways

Securing an adequate SEO budget requires more than just demonstrating its value.

You can’t just use projections and forecasts of potential organic traffic; you need to align your efforts with your business’s broader marketing strategy and objectives.

Unlike performance marketing and paid channels, which have a prominent input-output metric system, SEO is a long-term investment that does compound over time.

It can contribute to brand success not just organically, but also in the overall visibility retention and customer acquisition.

To justify SEO budgets, you want to focus on precise audience segmentation, identifying your high-value customer groups, mapping the customer journeys, and aligning those with SEO efforts.

By presenting SEO as a performance-driven strategy rather than just a sunk cost with an infinite timeline, you can effectively communicate its role in driving sustainable growth and value to the business, thus securing necessary investment now and in the future with long-term success.

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