How to successfully not waste your SEO budget?

You will find 101 ways to boost your SEO or optimization hacks for 2018 almost everywhere you look. With most of these tricks and hacks, you won't even need 101 ways, only a couple of them can drain your marketing budget before you can say "Happy New Year." 2019 is going to be a tough year for the marketing novices, especially if you have not perfected your search engine marketing game yet.

You need to optimize your business presence on the web to remain visible amidst the hundreds of similar brands and competitive seller sites coming up. By the end of 2018, the e-commerce market share will grow another 23.3%. Digital market experts expect the profits to hit close to $4.5 trillion by 2021. Without SEO, there is no way your business can survive the oncoming surge of e-commerce platforms.

Believing that you have the perfect SEO plan

Many brands think they have an optimization plan in place. They use reliable website builders and hosting platforms that pack a decent volume of inbuilt SEO features. That is enough reason for any amateur website owner to feel better about themselves, but is it enough for Google to feel right about you too? If SEO is an inbuilt feature of your e-commerce template, then other online stores using similar templates have access to the same features.

Thinking you don’t need an expert

These are also the same businesses, which believe that they do not require the service of developers. Every company needs an SEO developer to turn an average audit into a great one! Since everyone starts from the same ground level, the resources of the business and the skill set of the developer determine the future of a company’s sales and revenue. SEO provides exemplary evidence of the necessity of relevant talent in the field of marketing. Without a developer, it is impossible to conduct a proper SEO audit. In short, no developer equals no SEO!

Most importantly, not having a developer causes several struggles with budgets. SEO budgets will be a problem as long as DIY-SEO projects and self-trained SEO novices will be around. Yes, having a ceiling on the expenditures of digital marketing does help to regulate business expenses. However, setting up your social media marketing, search engine marketing, and email marketing budgets depending on the upcoming trends in SEO can be extremely misleading. They can distract you from what is necessary for the survival and functioning of your site.

Directing your budget towards SEO gimmicks

Every website requires you to keep aside a part of the budget for implementation. Engaging in SEO makes little sense unless you have the resources to implement the changes and to track their effects. SEO does depend on trends, but great SEO cannot happen without enough relevant data. You need accurate data from reliable sources, and that is not cheap. Buying records en masse from SEO resellers will not help you much. You need marketing expertise for planning the correct distribution of budget. When budgeting is confusing, you can turn to your local Brooklyn SEO experts for help.

Chasing the SEO white rabbits

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can tell people how their websites are performing, and which aspects require more effort. Keyword density, PageRank engineering, and high volume keywords are the white rabbits of the SEO world. Once you start chasing them down the rabbit hole, the only way you are going is down. Unless you want to be Alice, you need to buck up and start looking at the more realistic and long-term plans for SEO. While the factors we have mentioned above are not important performance indicators or KPIs at all. They are fluff metrics that do little to help Google rankings.

What should you do instead?

Pay attention to the real metrics

You need to take your focus off such fancy terms, that actually mean naught and you need to start looking at the value-adding parameters including the content quality, keyword research, headers, title tags, meta description, alt tags, URL structures, SEO title and slugs, and site’s link profile. These are over 200 ranking signals that a website sends to Google. Even without the gimmicky KPIs, you will have plenty to take care of during your SEO campaigns.

Focus on real data

Your SEO campaigns should not only manage and update the value-adding KPIs. They should also generate vast amounts of data for your business, in general. Your campaigns should be able to tell you which geographical regions produce the most response, which age groups love your new products and what social media channels send the highest volumes of traffic your way. The aim of perfecting any SEO campaign is the ability to access and harness the latest set of data. Data is the real power when it comes to digital marketing.

SEO demands patience

While implementing a new SEO strategy, always remember to be a little patient. It is not a magic potion or a quick makeover that takes effect in 5 minutes. Some SEO strategies can take five weeks to kick into action. The rise in footfall is usually gradual but steady.

Nonetheless, SEO is effective in multiple ways, and it will always be relevant for all websites. Some SEO campaigns for larger e-commerce sites even require three to six months for Google to complete crawling. Once the search engine spiders complete crawling the sites, they will then assess the new ranking signals and reflect the results.

Good optimization strategies are for everyone!

SEO takes time for every website, but for e-commerce sites, the period of wait is usually longer than blogs. E-commerce platforms have an astronomical number of elements that need individual attention. Every aspect of a seller website can demand optimization including the carts, product descriptions, the lists, and even the product images or videos. Thankfully, all retail sites can leverage SEO since it is scalable and flexible. There are no one-size-fits-all models, and there are no fixed price tags on the services.