If you are launching a new business, or simply getting a bit more serious about how you market your business in 2016, you may be in the process of doing some planning and getting your head around what a budget should look like for any new digital marketing assets you may need (such as a website) and how much you should invest in SEO, PPC and social media to bring your website (and in turn business) enquiries and sales. Common questions we have already been asked this year by people in this scenario, and their respective answers are listed below:

What are the approx. costs for a 6 months running SEO and complementary Local AdWords campaign with the target to achieve branding, Leads and growing traffic to our site?

If we are going to be preparing your website, we will get to know your audience, and can therefore make some recommendations in terms of which social media, PPC or SEO packages may be the most relevant.

If we’re not doing your website, we’ll first have a good look at your website to better understand your product/service and positioning. Also key is understanding what your objectives are. We’ll also generally get our clients to answer the following questions:

— Which location are your target audience located i.e. from what point and to how many km’s surrounding will you / can you service? This is particularly important for location based businesses, say a catering company, but not so important to a products based business that can ship anywhere, say, an online retailer.
— What are some demographics you think relate to your target audience? i.e. gender, age, marital status, education level, roles?
— What keywords (broad) do you think your target market are searching? (don’t worry, we’ll always conduct our own independent research but getting a heads up from you is always helpful)
— Competitors – Please provide the website + social networks for any competitors you’d like to emulate – this helps us to evaluate how stiff the competition is and how we might go about marketing you.

What are the approx. costs for a 6 months running SEO and complementary Local AdWords campaign with the target to achieve branding, leads and growing traffic to our site?

Our minimum Adwords package is $375/month + ad spend but this is a very basic campaign. If your budget will stretch this far we’d recommend you go up to $600/month + adspend which will allow us to do 5 hours/month which is 1 hour a week optimising the campaign and a 1 hour meeting each month to go over results.

In terms of SEO, if we are creating you a website, we will do a certain level of on page optimisation as part of the website build, however we would always recommend more on page optimisation and then a proactive off page optimisation campaign if you really want to get found on Google and the other search engines. It won’t just ‘happen’ from putting your website live.

Depending on how competitive your market is and what you are optimising for will depend on how much optimisation we need to do and over what period. Our minimum plan is $375/month up to $600/month if your budget will stretch this far.…  We can potentially package these services if you sign off for 6 months.

Another consideration is the potential of doing a Facebook Ad campaign. These tend to return very good results for our clients also. To some degree it really does depend on the budget you have to commit over a 6 month period. If you can define this we can work backwards and recommend associated services which fit within the budget.

What is the expected time frame to realise a positive return on investment?

We’d need to first define your goals and objectives and what you deem a positive return on investment. For instance some clients deem a set number of enquiries/leads per month to be a positive return on investment. Others who operate an ecommerce site are looking for transactions on their site. But as a guideline a good performing website achieves 1-2% conversion rate, so for every 100 people you get on your site 1-2 might enquire and then it is up to how well you convert them via phone/email etc.

But generally within 3 months we have a fair idea of what is working and what is not by meeting monthly with our client.

Do you build and maintain the keyword list for the PPC campaign or is that our responsibility? How do you build the list initially?

Yes we usually build and maintain the keyword list for the PPC campaign. We build this through using a range of professional softwares, loading it to Google Spreadsheets, and running it by you to ensure there are no words which are irrelevant. We also gain your input on any other keyword sets we should explore. Once the keyword set is locked in we start the campaign!

For a very few clients we will do a ‘set and forget’ campaign where we build it but do not actively manage it thereafter – the client sometimes attempts to. These do not tend to perform as well and they often come back to us for help!

How do you handle seasonal effects or short term promotions in regards to the PPC campaign?

This can be the case for some clients. We can either decrease the spend during these periods and know that it is likely a quieter period, or we can devise campaigns which will hopefully not see so much of a dip.

What are the expected intervals for regular data reports and analysis to keep track of targets?

Generally monthly with regular contact on our project management system, Teamwork, throughout the month. So in short you’ll have full transparency about how the campaign is tracking.

CONCLUSION

I hope this gives you some indications about our PPC & SEO services.

Key is being clear on your objectives (which we can help you with) and defining a budget you can work to. Key is that we offer full transparency on all the clients we work with, providing monthly reports, and, depending on which package you are on, monthly meetings, to go through results to show you what is working.

Should you wish to request a quote at any time, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We look forward to hearing from you.