How to Justify and Make a Business Case for SEO Budgets

How to Justify and Make a Business Case for SEO Budgets

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the highest-ROI marketing channels available today, driving long-term, compounding growth, earning traffic, leads, and revenue without ongoing ad spend.

There’s no one-size-fits-all SEO budget. What a business spends on SEO depends on its growth goals, maturity, market competitiveness, and internal capabilities.

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.

Performance marketing encompasses a wide range of marketing platforms, including paid search. Compared to the value-add and objectives of SEO, the ROI and leads produced by those channels are considerably more visible on a balance sheet.

It is crucial to differentiate SEO from traditional paid advertising channels, which many other channels fall into, when defending the SEO budget. Although it is a component of a performance marketing strategy, it does not have a direct input-output goal.

In most cases, 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 genAI and large language models (LLMs).

SEO is, for the most part, a longer-term strategy.

Using many marketing frameworks to effectively fight for SEO budgets as part of the broader marketing budget.

• You can leverage the audience segmentation for identifying high-value customer groups and then use historical data and forecasting
• You can demonstrate the potential ROI of target campaigns for those segments
• You can quantify Headroom for targeting specific keyword clusters

Segment Your Audience

Divide your customer base into distinct groups as per demographics, behaviors, needs, and “unmet” needs, to understand their characteristics.

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

This also encompasses how LLMs and other sources may influence their search process before ultimately focusing on a small number of products and considering that purchase.

Identify High-Value Segments

After having your clear segments in your audience, start identifying those that provide the four key things –

• Who is showing Fit
• Who is showing Value
• Who is showing Intent
• Who is showing Headroom

Use data for analysing and pinpointing your customer segments with high prospective lifetime value, good purchase frequency, or good profile margin.

If, for example, you are a luxury clothing brand, people make less frequent purchases, but with high value.

Thus, you want the SEO segment to emphasise brand retention and loyalty.

On the contrary, recent studies shown that 60% of potential customers are likely to switch brands based on cost in the mass cosmetic and skincare industry.

You need to ensure that you are creating positive brand experiences and want to maintain that mental availability.

If so, while reviewing your SEO budget, you should highlight these goals (as well as how they benefit the company).

Additionally, as part of your SEO plan, demonstrate how your value propositions and SEO may support the more general corporate goals of longer-term customer group retention and ROI.

Map Customer Journeys

Identifying your high-value segments provides you with the best balance of your investment for starting a better understanding and mapping that customer journey.

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.

Communicate Business Alignment

While advocating budget, communicate clear, measurable goals. Whether SMART goals or just arbitrary targets of growth over time.

These are needed for providing decision-makers with some ability for understanding, 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.

KPIs

The business’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and those unique to that SEO marketing channel might be matched with your budget areas.

Conversion rates, customer lifetime values, score rings, and customer acquisition costs are all examples of KPIs, which are metrics that should represent the overarching marketing objectives.

Determine Budget “Effort” Allocation

In marketing, a lot of resource allocation can sometimes follow the 70-20-10 rule, which is typically an effort and resource allocation model.

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

Key Takeaways

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

SEO is a long-term investment that compounds over time. 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. It contributes to brand success not just organically, but also in terms of overall visibility, retention, and customer acquisition.

For justifying SEO budgets, you should emphasize on precise audience segmentation, identifying your high-value customer groups, mapping customer journeys, and aligning those with SEO efforts.

You may successfully convey SEO’s role in fostering sustainable growth and value for the company by portraying it as a performance-driven strategy rather than merely a sunk cost with an endless schedule. This would secure the required investment both now and in the future with long-term success