Most online marketing agencies don’t like to take on clients with advertising budgets of anything less than R20k per month. There are a number of reasons for that, but the fact is that there is a place for smaller companies, or companies with limited budgets in the search specific advertising space.
Firstly, can you really expect a South African based company to whom internet marketing is still to a large extend a relatively new concept, to immediately start spending R20k per month on some new unfamiliar marketing channel? It’s not always an easy task convincing people to look further than the traditional marketing avenues when there are new budget allocations involved…
Secondly, depending on which industry you’re trying to market and who you are targeting, you can in most cases, easily prove to a client that search marketing or more specific, paid search marketing, will work for them with a monthly budget of R6k to R10k. One of the best selling points of PPC marketing is the great ROI generated by the channel. This will ensure that clients who start off on small budgets will in time see how their investments are working for them and increase their budgets accordingly.
In short what I’m trying to say is that if you have a marketable product, search marketing can definitely work for your company, even if you don’t have a massive budget to start with.
Hi Jan,
I am curious as to how to how much i should spend on SEO activity as opposed to PPC, lots of different people have told me different things and I would like to hear your opinion…
Thanks
Hi Roelf,
It’s very difficult for me to put an amount to what you should spend on SEO especially not knowing what the site is about.
In reality, your monthly PPC budget will more than likely eventually be more than your SEO monthly budget, but again, it completely depends on what type of site it is we’re talking about. For instance, an information site with tons of articles, etc. on it might be more costly from an SEO perspective than a catalogue type site that sells products… Depending on the goals of the two sites, the PPC costs could be more or less the same.
That being said, two similar sized content heavy sites targeting two different industries, could have more or less the same SEO costs, but when it comes to PPC, the more popular industry with the most used (popular) keywords will be more expensive.
It really depends on your objectives for the site as well as the type of site. The goals of the site could for instance require new articles every week and if that falls under SEO for you, the costs could come close or be more than the PPC spend.
In my opinion, you should definitely make sure that your site is SEO friendly at the very least and that you have some kind of link building strategy. Then if you want immediate results, PPC can get you there quickly.
Hope that sheds some light…