How to Build an SEO Budget? Practical Methods!

Practical guide to forecasting organic ROI, allocating tooling and team resources, and securing executive SEO buy-in.

Speakers: Samet Özsüleyman, Metehan Urhan

25 Jun 2024

Video Transcript

⏱ 24 min read• 4,206 words

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— Hey everyone, welcome to Zeo Talks. Today Mete and I are digging into how to build an SEO budget. Mete, welcome.

— Thanks, glad to be here. Hey Samet, how are you?

— I'm good, how about you? How's it going?

— I'm good too, thanks a lot. It's going great. We did a Zeo Talks before. That was a few months ago now, I think.

— Yeah, exactly.

— Today we're back with a new topic. It's mostly for brands. But it touches agencies too.

— Absolutely. Let me jump right into my first question. You know this already. It's one of the most common questions in client calls: "What does SEO cost?" "What do SEO costs actually cover?" You get a lot of questions like that. So in short. I'd love it if you could explain to our viewers and listeners what SEO really costs.

— Of course. Like a lot of what we'll cover today, this has two perspectives. There's the cost from the brand's side. And there's the cost on the agency side. Within the brand, running this in-house is one cost. Working with an agency is another. From the brand's point of view, you've got options. You either work with an agency or a third party. Which could be a freelancer or an agency. Or you handle it in-house. And doing it in-house means a team cost, obviously.

Some brands prefer that. They work with an agency and build an in-house team too. Others hand this side over to an agency completely. As a consultant, you've worked with brands in both setups. That's happened in the past too. Let me start here. In the scenario where the brand runs this in-house, there's the cost of a team. The cost of the tools that team will use matters a lot. Especially on a big project. Multiple languages, a high page count, or a complex setup. Sometimes one tool just isn't enough.

You'll need a tool for the crawl side. You'll need something like Ahrefs or Semrush for competitor and keyword research. Then there's content cost. If you have writers in-house, you can write it yourself. Or you can outsource the writing. There's the backlink side. If the project needs backlink acquisition, doing that in-house isn't really possible. You'll have to outsource it. Broadly, that's how the costs break down. Let me toss the ball back to you. What kind of brands should work with an agency? And which ones should run this in-house?

What should they watch for when making that call? Let's hear that from you.

— Sure, sure. I think it starts with belief. They have to believe this will work. And they have to trust the agency or the people they hire. Companies with that mindset can work with an agency. Because SEO success here is a long-term process. You can't forget that. And you just mentioned it. Building a team, the cost of that team. All of it adds up to a serious expense at the end of the day. Let me add a quick note on the SEO tools you mentioned. Say we have a site with 100,000-plus pages.

Or rather, a site where we can crawl 100,000 pages. And say that site is JavaScript-based. If you own a crawler, that crawl also needs JavaScript rendering turned on. And now all of this... You pay for the crawler. Then you pay extra on top. Like I said. All of it can add up to a lot of cost at the end of the day. If we look at content costs...

— Quick interruption here, Samet. Let me add one thing. In the last month or so. We met with one of the biggest publishers in Turkey. This was one of the first questions they asked the agency. The stuff you care about, basically. We've got millions of pages. We run multiple sites. And with our current agency, the technical side is one of our biggest pain points. Which crawlers do you use? Are there limits on them? If we work together, will we hit problems here? That was the question we got.

So the crawler side matters a lot. Especially on big projects. Especially for web sites with a high page count.

— Absolutely. On the content side, here's what I'd add. Yes, writing new content is already an extra cost. And sometimes, for certain brands, we keep a content update sheet. You know how it goes. Say something published six months ago. "Motor Vehicles Tax," for example. Or any other topic. It might need an update. Now you have to update it. So it's not just new content. Refreshing existing content carries extra costs too. That was one of the things that came to mind when I think about SEO cost.

— Yes, exactly. I think we can wrap up this topic like this. If you have a big web site. If it really demands serious technical experience. If your page count is high. If multiple languages are live. Basically, a big, hard project like that. One person usually can't handle it alone. Bringing in just one person who knows SEO and letting them run the whole thing? That can fail. But maybe you have a small web site. Maybe you're starting out more as an amateur. Or you're in a very niche industry.

Few competitors. Few pages. Few products. Then you can probably handle it in-house with a smaller team. But in the other scenario, you need more experience. Different perspectives. Multiple tools. There you'll probably need an agency. In that scenario. Building a 2-3 person team in-house can cost way more than an agency. You'd need senior people. Very experienced hires. Brands can decide based on that. Work with an agency, or run the process in-house.

— Absolutely. I think you summed it up really well. Next topic: we just talked about the cost of SEO. So what's the cost of not doing SEO? I want to touch on that briefly. What are your thoughts on the cost of skipping SEO?

— We discussed this in a meeting very recently. It's less about not doing SEO. It's more about pushing it to the back burner. One of the brands I met with is in a tough industry. I won't give too many details. Nothing that identifies the brand. But it's a tough industry. Search volumes are huge there. Two or three giant sites dominate the whole sector. Big brands. Four or five years back, they pulled a million-plus in traffic. Now they're down around a hundred thousand.

Along the way the site's infrastructure changed. There were redesign cycles. Server-side changes too. They took hits from a bunch of algorithm updates. Traffic kept sliding. By the end of that four or five year stretch. Traffic was down to a tenth of what it was. So in Google's eyes it became a site carrying negative signals for a long time. The brand came to us hoping a new agency could turn it around. I told them straight up this won't be easy. It's a hard project. The sector itself is hard.

Page count is massive. Multiple languages, and so on. Bouncing back to the old numbers won't happen fast. We talked through all of that. So look, not doing SEO isn't a minus if you're starting from zero. You'll just stay at zero. But say you already have some performance. And then at some point you stop caring about SEO, no in-house work. No outside help. You ignore all of it. Then you can lose serious traffic and visibility, exactly like the example I just gave.

Cleaning that up can take a few months. Sometimes even more than a year. That's just to turn it into an upward trend. Not even to get back to the same level. So the cost of ignoring SEO can go pretty far. Sometimes all the way to moving onto a brand new domain, unfortunately. I wanted to unpack that with something I ran into recently.

— You did great. And here's the thing, especially with newly launched brands. Let's say Samet Tekstil just opened up. If users are already landing on the site, they go back to Google. They search things like "is samettekstil.com trustworthy?" Or "samettekstil.com return policy." Lots of different questions. If we don't exist there at all. If our pages can't get indexed or crawled. That pushes us straight into the background. On top of that, if a user files a complaint. And we can't even show up in those complaint results. That hurts our credibility too. Brand awareness matters here just like it does in SEO. The more SEO çalışması you do, the more you support your brand awareness.

The other issue is you might be losing traffic to competitors in your vertical. If they make a bigger SEO yatırımı than you, the gap widens. And one more thing that comes to mind. SEO çalışmaları can help pull high ad costs down to a much lower level. Because once those pages get optimized, their quality scores go up. And in Google Ads, cost per click can drop to lower levels. So in that sense, SEO actually supports your PPC work. Something else came to mind while talking. SEO can also help on the server optimization or hosting side. Meaning, it helps after you do SEO. When we don't do it, there's no benefit. So how does it help when we do? Say the images on your site are 4-5 megabytes each. And say there are hundreds of them.

Those obviously take up space on your hosting. You're going to optimize them. You'll also be able to optimize your time to first byte metrics. There are a lot of areas like that. SEO work can actually cut how much you spend on the server side too.

— Yes, exactly. We go straight at traffic and positions. But like you said, SEO clearly affects a lot of things indirectly. To avoid ending up at a disadvantage in those areas. You need to take SEO seriously. As fast as possible, without wasting time.

— Exactly. I already touched on competitors earlier. So how much SEO yatırımı are competitors making? How can we measure that? Or what predictions can we make about it, Mete?

— Yeah, this is another question we get a lot. One of the basics here: if they rank at the top for industry keywords. They're probably already investing. That alone matters a lot. And you look at criteria like how long they've been in the industry. Domain age, and so on. If the brand we see as a competitor shows up for a lot of target keywords. They're probably making a SEO yatırımı. But what can you look at more specifically? You can track their backlink profile. Are backlink counts climbing? Are backlinks coming in on target keywords? Or how often do they create new pages?

Take an e-commerce site, for example. Do they have category content? Are the titles and descriptions clean? Very simply, when you run a crawl from the outside. How many errors do you hit? Are there basic errors on the site or not? You can check all that. If they have a blog, how often do they publish? Are they adding new content? How much per month? You can check those too. With this kind of stuff we obviously can't know exactly how much a competitor spends. But at least we can tell whether they care about SEO'ya. And how aggressive they're being. You can track that from the outside.

— Absolutely. One thing I'd add: backlink spend. Not spend exactly, but you can review their backlink work. Through tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. In the reference domain section, looking at the last date the Ahrefs bot crawled. Or looking at the "new" section. That's where I can see competitors. As an SEO person. I can tell from there whether that competitor is picking up backlinks. So it's roughly in that ballpark. The money anchor text there is already screaming it. You can tell from that. Of course, some backlinks come in naturally too. Those are already in the bag. One more thing I can add: say we want to run a calculation. Like how much budget my competitor puts into content. We could roughly do something like this.

Let's start with a product description or category content on an e-commerce site. Take a look, how many words are there? A thousand words. What does producing average content cost? X lira. So 1000 times X gives you the cost of producing content. Then crawl the competitor and see how many pages they wrote content for. Look, they wrote 30 pages. Roughly this many words each. So they set aside about this much content budget. That kind of planning works too. You also mentioned content production frequency earlier. Cadence, more precisely. That reminded me of something while you were talking. I was doing a competitor analysis for a brand. The competitor's last-updated or first-published date wasn't visible anywhere. Not in structured data, not in the interface.

Sure, you can go check the web archive. But I need to run a crawl or a bot analysis to get an insight. So I went in, the site's on WordPress. They add featured images to blog posts, right? They had added an image for every blog under the uploads folder. And inside uploads, those were organized by date and day. So I pulled those and figured out the competitor's content production frequency that way.

— Something else came to mind. Your team built that thing, right? The automation that tracks a competitor's sitemap on a schedule. Automations like that work here too. This might be a bit more advanced level. But with that kind of setup you can track how often a competitor updates their sitemap. How many pages they add, and so on.

— Yes, yes. Absolutely. My next topic: SEO audit. When is an SEO audit actually useful? That's the direct question I'll put to you right now.

— Yeah, so here it kind of depends on the situation.

— Maybe define an SEO audit first, if you want. That'd be more useful for folks who don't know it.

— So what we call an SEO audit is really, well, hani SEO. Yes, it's a long process. It takes some time and patience. And an SEO audit is basically a one-time SEO çalışması. Either on one specific topic, or on the website as a whole. So when is this actually useful? There are situations where it works. We've done one-off support for some brands in the past. But let's start from the beginning. If you're making a SEO yatırımı and there's no in-house team working on it. A single audit won't be enough on its own.

Because SEO is a process, plain and simple. Yes, you make some improvements on your site. You improve your pages. You improve your content. You produce new pages and new content. You handle technical optimizations. But all of that has to keep going over time. The technical side needs regular monitoring. New technical errors and gaps need to get caught fast and fixed. That's why a SEO audit alone falls short for a lot of brands and projects. But in the cases where we usually help out, as you know. Samet, take a migration project. The site changes its infrastructure. Or the e-commerce platform changes, the design changes, and so on. Especially with a high page count or a big project, outside help matters here. To keep that process aligned with SEO, a one-time engagement makes sense.

Or maybe you have budget limits. The cost of working with agencies feels like too much right now. Getting an audit at certain points in the year can make sense. I say this by comparison: versus doing nothing at all. Or ignoring SEO entirely, an audit is definitely more useful. But once a year falls short in a lot of ways. Beyond that, here's another situation. Say the brand has its own SEO team. They run the whole process themselves. But at certain intervals, they want an outside eye on the project.

We're buried deep in the work. Simple things start slipping past us. So take a look at the project with fresh eyes. Pull out the gaps and the mistakes for us. Tell us what we know and what we don't. Requests come in like that. In cases like that, an audit makes sense. There's no ongoing need. You're covering it yourself. But a different set of eyes now and then is smart. In those situations, an SEO audit is a genuinely useful service. Beyond that, though, running on SEO audit alone won't cut it. Doing it once or twice across huge time gaps won't get you to success.

— Absolutely. And there's the SEO audit itself. When you're getting a quote or moving forward, ask about scope. What exactly will you do in this SEO audit? Those questions need to go to the agencies. Otherwise, different people use different crawlers. How you read the output matters. You mentioned earlier that teams with in-house SEO can also get an SEO audit. There are definitely colleagues out there watching and listening to us. Like you said, they get deep in the weeds sometimes. Or their meeting load gets way too heavy.

So they might not get to look at the crawl results. Or something just slips past them. Sometimes it's that we do this work too. I did it this way, but is it actually right? There doesn't always have to be an action at the end of it. An insight, a yes that's correct, or I did this and it was wrong. Even just hearing how someone else thinks helps us SEO folks a lot. Even a brainstorm can be way more useful in SEO çalışmaları. Otherwise anyone can look at crawler results. They'll pull a report that's more or less the same. But SEO audit work with real insight matters here. The kind where we can show what actually helps the site.

Instead of just flagging long titles and short titles. Say look, you've got critical errors like these. Take action, here's what I'd recommend. That approach is always going to be more useful.

— And like you said, especially when major decisions are coming. Say there's a big site. It already gets great traffic and holds strong positions. Now you're opening up to new markets. New languages are getting added to the site. Should it be a subfolder or a subdomain? Or do we buy separate country-code domains? Or maybe the whole category tree gets rebuilt. If you're making major calls like that. Ones that can move the site's traffic, where a wrong move hurts it. Then yeah. Outside support makes sense, like you said.

Back then you could get one-off services there too. Adding to what Samet said, scope matters a lot. Good that you brought it up. Some agencies only do teknik audit. Others do a full content audit. And some brands only handle backlink audit. Then there are scenarios covering the entire site. You'll remember, a couple years back. A client told us they had an audit done by an overseas agency. And the price was way high. Way above the Turkish market. I think it was someone or an agency from the UK. I don't remember the details. But what they handed the brand was really basic. It was just a crawl output.

— Signum Frog, or if it were Signum Frog, that'd still be fine. Their SEO person grabbed the EMP errors from Search Console and dumped them here. Says there are EMP errors. We can already see that. So what's your action recommendation?

— Yeah, exactly. Audits like this can be both expensive and useless. Very inefficient. So when you get an audit done, ask what the scope will be. Ask which areas get covered. For example, if content is included, how many pieces get optimized? How much new content gets written? You need to question all of it. You also need to scope it around the brand's and the project's actual needs. Because applying the same cookie-cutter checklist to every project, every web site. Checking the same things every time, can give you an equally useless result.

There's a ton of detail on this side too. I mean, the SEO audit.

— So much. By the way, my personal take. I think the SEO community in Turkey is in great shape compared to a lot of countries. We really have some genius people among us. So I think we're very lucky. Agency side, freelance side, brand side. Great work is being done on the sites and industries Turkish consultants serve.

— I agree. And I really agree on work quality too. There are so many technical people on the agency side. People we've met through the industry, folks we worked with at Zeo. Or people we met through other agencies and brands. The Turkish community really does have very technical people. And on service quality too. There are exceptions, of course. But I think the general average is good. Client relationships, how they communicate, how often they communicate. I'd say the industry has a pretty solid service standard.

I mean, exceptions aside, of course.

— My last question, Mete: is SEO training necessary? I added this for a reason. While doing SEO çalışması, we actually end up educating brands a bit. The work we hand over, why it needs to happen. For example, we say let's add this parameter to robots.txt. Let's disallow that one. The reason is this. Or let's drop the disallow here, because these got indexed in the SERP. Let's pull them from the index first. Lots of little details like that come up. And while we deliver those and explain them, we educate the client a little. Personally I think getting SEO training helps when you're educating a client. So I added this question to see if you agree with me.

— Sometimes you also get this question: what is robots.txt? Really basic questions come up too. And honestly, that changes by brand. Of course training is never a bad thing. If the curriculum is solid, and the instructor is experienced and technical. It's always going to help. Here's the thing, though. With the big brands we work with, there's already some SEO awareness. The person across from us isn't an SEO specialist. Sometimes it's the corporate communications team. Sometimes it's digital marketing. Sometimes we talk straight to the engineering team.

If we can speak a common language, it may not be strictly necessary. It helps, sure. But we can't say it's a must. Because researching the details is already the agency's job. So is spotting the problem. So is building the fix. So is briefing the brand in detail and turning it into documentation. But if we can speak that common language, great. Say the client knows the basic terms we use. Say they can read our documentation and get the root cause and the fix. That's ideal. But the other scenario happens a lot too. It might be a new brand. Or they might be just starting their SEO yatırımı.

The team might be far from the topic. In that case, training really pays off. It helps you speak the common language. It also raises the return on the service you buy from the agency. And like you said, when you work with an agency, you always have a counterpart. Sometimes several. You ask them questions, of course. Sometimes in writing. Sometimes in meetings. But if your SEO experience is broader, training still helps. The training here doesn't need to run for long weeks. Not if you're not chasing deep expertise. If speaking the agency's language is enough, a one-day training works. Sometimes a few days.

We usually split out the technical side. Then on-page, off-page, the backlink side, performance measurement, tool usage. We can break it into headings like that. Again, if you set a solid training scope based on the brand's needs. And make it hands-on, then like I said, two things happen. The agency work you're paying for gets more efficient. And the people on the other side gain something personally and professionally. Maybe not deep expertise. But a new interest area, for sure.

— Absolutely. Thanks so much, Mete. I don't think I have any other questions. Hopefully we gave everyone watching and listening some real insight into SEO costs. What those costs actually are. And what SEO yapmamanın can end up costing you. Hopefully we covered those topics well. Anything else you'd want to add?

— Basically, yeah. We covered a lot of detail. There's obviously way more to dig into. If we skipped something, or you want us to go deeper somewhere, hit the comments. Drop your questions there and we'll try to answer fast.

— Absolutely. Let's wrap the video up then. Thanks so much for watching. Take care of yourselves, see you soon. And don't forget to follow Zeo's channel.

— See you next time.

This transcript was generated using AI speech recognition and verified against subtitle style rules.

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