Budgeting for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are a tremendous amount of variables to consider when looking at developing a search engine marketing budget for your company. Even marketing managers may have a difficult time assessing how well their company’s website is doing and more over the direction and resources they need, in order to make it highly visible in the search engine result pages (SERPS). Apart from hiring a company like [[www.leveltendesign.com | LevelTen Interactive]] to develop an online business plan and a budget to make that happen, there are a couple useful tools that could help get you into your budget ballpark. A great research tool used and reviewed by many online direct marketers and agencies is [[http://www.sherpastore.com/home.html | The Search Marketing Benchmark Guide]] put our by [[www.marketingsherpa.com |Marketing Sherpa]]. This guide is an A-Z look at search marketing, the industry, statistics, trends and projections. The guide takes an objective look at the industry and supports its findings by gobbs of surveyed data. It provides a good birds eye view as well as an in depth look at search marketing so that you can plan for the future. It even has a nice little section on budgeting statistics for SEO and PPC. The guide is put out on an annual basis. Another small helper is a site called [[http://compete.com/ | compete.com]]. It’s a free way to look at monthly traffic going to your site as well as the competition. If you want to checkout what your competition is spending on their media buys take a look at [[http://www.spyfu.com | spyfu.com]]. Again, there is lots to consider when budgeting for your sites search engine marketing efforts. I hope these few suggestions are helpful.