How would you spend $3K in SEO

[MBS]

I have a site similar to Pat Flynn's security guard training site (but for a different niche)

The content is useful for people wanting to pursue that career.

The site is about 8 months old

Currently makes about $50 a month and has the potential to make north of $1K per month if rankings improve.

I am planning to invest $3K in the SEO for the site.

Outreach isn't much of an option for this site.

How would you spend the SEO budget for this site?

I hope the responses will help others as well in a similar situation or with new sites.

 

[Darth]

There is no need to invest $3K in a site making only $50/m. Why not invest $500 and see if you get any uplift and then invest more. It sounds like high quality PBNs would work.

 

[stackcash]

I know that site well, as just about every one of his readers try's to rip it off when they order content from us.

Outreach is always an option, you're just not thinking outside the box.

If you don't want to do e-mail outreach, building PBN sites by yourself is the next best bet. Of course, they could be found and deindexed at any point...so proceed at your own risk.

I wouldn't buy any other publically provided service other than what you might find here in the BuSo marketplace. Even then...if it's not outreach, I'd be careful.

Instead, make a list of the publicly offered services you were thinking about buying and hire & train a VA to build those links for you.

 

[MBS]

There is no need to invest $3K in a site making only $50/m. Why not invest $500 and see if you get any uplift and then invest more. It sounds like high quality PBNs would work.

Based on the traffic it gets and money it makes, I am ready to commit to it more than $500. Not sure how many meaningful links I will be able to buy with just $500.

I know that site well, as just about every one of his readers try's to rip it off when they order content from us.

Outreach is always an option, you're just not thinking outside the box.

If you don't want to do e-mail outreach, building PBN sites by yourself is the next best bet. Of course, they could be found and deindexed at any point...so proceed at your own risk.

I wouldn't buy any other publically provided service other than what you might find here in the BuSo marketplace. Even then...if it's not outreach, I'd be careful.

Instead, make a list of the publicly offered services you were thinking about buying and hire & train a VA to build those links for you.

It's not a ripoff site. It's basically has some similar structure to it but targets completely different trade.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

My view is that too many people think about how to price up their SEO buys incorrectly. I also think that about advertising... social... traffic leaking... and so on but I'll keep on focus here...

So what you don't want to do is go around picking some number based on what you 'guess might be reasonable to get something done' as your 'budget' and spend it all then find you're page 2-6 for everything and getting basically no extra traffic except for a few stray long tails.

You're not much better off on page 6 than page 14...

We only take a few (mostly referral only) actual consulting clients these days but when we do one of the features of our report pre-sign up is the 'gap to close' analysis, and it uses some simple measures to estimate how far behind the site is and give a monthly 'workrate' that will achieve some specified short term objectives in 6-9 months. It has a really solid hit rate so I thought I'd share it here so you can actually work out for yourself whether realistically you can achieve.

We try to keep it simple but basically we just do a bunch of searches to identify about 5 'solid performers' across the keywords we're targeting. If you use SerpWOO this is even easier as you have lots of data for your target keywords going back to when you started monitoring (say when we spoke to them the first time).

Content

This one's quite easy as you often don't have to fully catch up but if every site that's beating you has 3x as long content and 20x as many pages (in the niche - obviously some broader sites will have a lot more outside what you're targeting but still be dominating in your niche) then you need to budget to close that up.

Technical Debt

Naturally you need to budget to close the gap on things like schema, page load times, UX, conversion etc. If you convert 1/4 as much as someone else it's easy for them to outspend you and outcompete you.

Links

Take a look at each of them and measure the 'good' links (a bit of a sniff test combined with the Domain Ratings of what they have - don't look at someone with 5,000 terrible links and think you need 5,000). Also look at things like their link velocity.

If you determine that on average the 'target' sites have 300 good LRDs and are building on average 10/month and you're on 100... then you have to not only close most of that gap but outbuild them otherwise you'll be another 120 behind in a year when you get to 300.

Now obviously there's some experience, and judgement needed, and I'm talking white hat thinking here mostly (so if you're able to build amazing PBNs, and blackhat like it's 1999 then some of this is irrelevant) but I think some people get into things thinking a relatively small amount of effort will massively move the needle when in reality your competitors are constantly fighting the fight too and you need to look realistically at how far ahead they are and what you need to do to be in that fight.

I was outgunned before when I had no seo experience, and was trying to make money as a poker coach and poker affiliate many years ago and it was clear to me that crushing those million dollar affiliate sites in the SERPS was beyond reach so I traffic leaked like crazy and did pretty ok. Sometimes SEO is the right thing to do, sometimes it isn't, but you should definitely go into the plan knowing whether you have the ammo to keep fighting long enough to win.