I am frequently contacted by businesses that simply don’t have the budget to land on page one of Google in the natural rankings. These clients need to do one of two things:
- Build a site with the possibility of future ranking, making sure you have the structure planned correctly for future expansion. Then do the more in depth SEO work when they have the money.
- Or, go directly to online advertising. Colorado is a great place to advertise online because of it’s tech savvy population.
Online advertising costs can be less to start, if you are not greedy. You can start with a few great keywords, and build.
Which Costs More, Natural Ranking or Online Advertising?
First, you have to realize there are many levels in each. Assuming starting from scratch with a few phrases as your goal, both require an initial investment of about the same amount.
With both approaches, ranking or online advertising, you need to decide which search phrases are most important to your business.
Therefore, each process starts with keyword research to find out which terms are best for you to try to get on page-one. I use that same research to identify online advertising opportunities.
The speed with which your site can get in front of potential clients is primary initial benefit.
Step 2 is to take key phrases identified, and create a plan for creating pages of your website. A typical menu of “about us, testimonials, services and contact us” isn’t going to get you very high rankings.
For online advertising good, relevant pages are also needed on your site in which to send customers, so we are still looking at roughly the same costs.
Step 3. Each page in your site needs to be optimized for Google. This is where costs begin to mount in SEO work. It takes money for planning, implementation, and tracking that incidentally, is not accounted for with cheap websites. Within each page we link phrases to other pages in your site to create a hierarchy that Google recognizes.
Getting ranked on page one of Google is a process. It begins with good page planning, goes into great content writing and distribution, is enforced with social media and citations, and is rewarded as it consistently grows over time.
It’s perfectly fine start out with a small site and work towards this. In fact search engines like to see monthly activity on your site, with original content. That means you set a monthly budget to have me write articles, or optimize articles that you write.
But if the budget is too small to allow for the various tasks involved in internet marketing, you simply can’t accomplish the goal of first page ranking if you face much competition in your market.
In these situations I recommend going to pay per click advertising so you know for certain you will be on page one of Google.
We will need to do a certain amount of planning, and ad writing, however, the process is quicker and your site pages do not need to be as in-depth.
You Must Invest in Your Business
To recap, you need a good initial investment with both search engine optimization and online advertising, however, you can get further, faster with advertising.
Ranking high is a multistep process, each process needs to be done a certain way, without taking shortcuts. This is not an inexpensive process. I understand that not every business has the budget to do this.
I offer training if you want to try it yourself, but you must a) have the time to do it b)want to put in the effort and c) have an aptitude for it even after learning how.
Worth the Price for a Consultant
For the skill level that I provide, my prices are very reasonable. However, my starting price may be more than every business can afford. For this I am truly sorry, but I can’t come down to the pricing of less skilled companies; and, reducing the scope of what I do will not allow you to be found on the first page of Google in most cases.
I encourage you to look into the pay per click programs that I offer. You can have immediate effectiveness at a lower entry price point.
You will most likely still need some work done to your website, but not nearly as much as trying for high organic ranking.
Call online advertising consultant Jon Camrud for a more in depth discussion about what is best for your particular budget.