I have $10,000 For SEO.... Is that enough?

Hi, I am starting a real business (life insurance brokerage) and I have a little over 10k dedicated to optimizing my site which is being built right now.

Is that enough? I know unique content and good keyword optimization will help me but what else is there? I am afraid of handing over the cash to a SEO firm and just not getting the results I am expecting.

My question to you is this, if you had 10k and were competing with such a widespread keyword (term life insurance) where would you invest your money??

Any suggestions will help,
Dan

 

If you want to have visitors for your website, and want to spend 10k I'd like to offer you following strategy:
1. Write good website with a lot of landing pages about your service, optimized for different keyfrases, like
life insurance for pensioner
life insurance for student
etc.
2. Buy some traffic from google adsense PPC and PPA and compare which landing pages are god, which are not
3. Create supporting website optimized for rare keywords, for example
life insurance for pensioner in Fort Myers (Florida)
do it for each city, town and village in your country or area.
from this website make obvious connection to your site
4. Rest money use to do external SEO actions (linkbuilding) with these two websites.

This is my plan of using these money.

 

okay that sounds great and I think I am in the right track because I have two landing pages done already.

so basically analyze my keywords carefully and do very specific ones?

 

Basically, it is very difficult (impossible) to be quickly on the TOP with key="insurance". So you must focused on long key phrases at the beginning. Do proper tree of your pages with top pages optimized for short phrases and deep pages optimized for long phrases.

Second website mentioned here - is a bit dark-SEO technique, that is why I strongly recommend to separate it, but in many cases its work perfect!

I think you working in right direction, but pay great attention to the website organization and design is important too!

 

You seem to know quite a bit about wp optimization, where did you learn it all?

 

I've spend 3y to learn SEO from different sources and now in position of registering my web-based SEO company.

 

There are insurance sites that spend six figures every month. $10K isn't near enough for a highly competitive keyword. The top SEO firms have a minimum contract of at least $5K per month.

Spend a lot of time reading these forums if you want to do some of the work yourself - otherwise you should concentrate on less competitive terms that are related to insurance.

 

I think its better to spend $1000 each month under different companies and see ur increase.

 

Hi Dan,

$10,000 is a good place to start - but I'd spend it on the layout, content and Web development instead of what many consider to be "SEO" (seriously). As the others have said, you're not going to rank well any time soon for your choice of search terms - especially given the hyper-competitive nature of the phrase. Instead, I'd focus your SEO marketing efforts on your local business area (which is the region that is 50 miles from your office in any direction), which will have a lot less competition (local compared to global) and will also likely net you a lot more targeted and pre-qualified traffic that is interested in obtaining your services at your price instead of just kicking the virtual tires.

But before doing that, I'd make sure the people who are developing your Web site knows what the hell they're doing. I'm a front-end Web developer by trade with over five years of experience making Web sites using the latest standards and best practices (I've even pushed the envelope a bit myself) - which the search engines LOVE by the way, so if you want me to look at the site as it is being developed to determine if it is being developed properly, feel free to PM me with a link to it (don't worry, I won't make a pitch for the job - I can however offer pointers that can give you ever last bit of edge your site can get if I feel your developer is doing a good job overall).

If you haven't done so yet, I'd also hire a Web copywriter to write your site's page content (all of it). Two Web copywriters I trust and can safely recommend are Linda Jenkinson and Robert Warren. I know both of them from the SitePoint Forums (in fact, Linda and I help moderate the forums over there, and Rob pokes his head around whenever he's not too busy with work). If you choose not to hire either of these individuals, but instead choose to hire another or to do it yourself, whatever you do, do not write for the search engines! Not only will your page copy be worth less than the digital paper it's virtually printed on, but it will also drive your visitors away to your competitors' sites faster than Al Bundy can stink up an airplane without his shoes on ("Can the man in seat 37b please put on your shoes? I'm choking." Al yells, "What? They show the movie Dutch and they think I stink?" - trivia: Ed O'Neil was also the star in Dutch). Instead, make sure your copywriter (or you, if you take it upon yourself to write the content for the Web site) caters to your customers' needs and desires while still appropriately and properly using keyword rich content so that your conversion rates climb through the roof and bring you more sales.

Make sure that you conduct a competitive keywords analysis (or that your Web copywriter does it for you) which will ultimately provide you a list of seed keywords (your key search phrases), secondary search phrases and a list of long-tail keywords. Then look at the Web sites of your top competitors and see what keywords they're optimizing for, whether they're doing it properly (I can also help you with that if need be), and then report any TOS violations to the search engines. If you can bump off your competitors because they're using black hat techniques and otherwise trying to manipulate the index, that'll be less competition for you to worry about (be careful though - report only the obvious ones - those who are using shady practices but are otherwise playing by the rules will be the ones you should use as your benchmarks).

You'll also want to check out where your competitors are linking to. But this is treading on search marketing territory, and making heads and tails of what data you gather here may be best done by a search engine optimization/marketing professional.

As far as your marketing efforts go though, I'd go with a balanced plan of attack. Don't rely on the search engines, but instead use them to compliment and enhance your off-line marketing efforts. Survey your existing customers, and make sure you include a link to your Web site's home page in the survey mailing. I'd even go so far as to include a business card with the Web site's address on it as well that your customers can give to their friends and colleagues as well. Who knows, one of them might be able to send a quality backlink your way. I'd also make sure you submit to Best of the Web (one time fee) and the Yahoo! Directory. I'm not a fan of the Open Directory Project due to the corruption that's rampant, not to mention the apparently poor quality of the editorial process, but if you can get a quality listing in the appropriate category, then by all means go for it. Just file your submission request and forget about it. Don't resubmit - let them take care of it (it's literally a "don't call us, we'll call you" situation here).

Doing this for the sake of SEO would be a bad idea. Instead, I'd attack this from an information architecture perspective by grouping all the services under one section (such as "Services") and then having a page dedicated to each service being offered. Of course, I'd also appropriately inter-link the pages internally where possible and practical just so I can get the ball started with getting keyword-rich anchor text filled links pointing back to my targeted pages.

Expect to do this for about 6-9 months, which is usually as long as it takes for the organic SEO results to start kicking in.

This is a bad idea - not only will you be doing more work than is necessary (developing and promoting multiple sites), but if you inter-link them to each other you will find all the sites being banned from the search indexes for participating in what they perceive to be a link farm. Instead, I'd focus my efforts on mentioning the areas that I provide my services in on the page copy itself and let the one site do the heavy llfting fo rme.

The money would be better off spent on quality pay directories that do not require a reciprocal link or are otherwise spammy, in addition to the PPC campaign and Yahoo! Directory and BOTW submissions.

That would depend entirely on how your Web site is being constructed and how the content of those Web pages are related to each other, to be honest.

I'd actually focus on local searches - everything within a 50 mile radius, since that's where he's likely to be doing the majority of his business anyway. Of course the long-tail search terms will help, and can bring in some quick free traffic, but I wouldn't focus on them as a primary means of optimization. They're "third-tier" search terms for a reason.

I wouldn't even bother - you'd be wasting twice as much time trying to promote two Web sites, and having the results of both marketing and promotion campaigns be diluted instead of focusing all your effort and energy on making the one Web site the best it can be.

I couldn't agree more (though the design itself has nothing to do with SEO from a technical standpoint, thankfully).

That would be for the national and international market, yes. But as with every business, one should start small and then work from there. It's worked on this planet for over 2 billion years, why can't it work online?

Just be careful who you listen to on this forum, however. A lot of the people here think they know their stuff, but they really don't. You can usualy tell which ones they are because I'm often correcting them when I'm not working on something (or am taking a break to exercise my mind) - as well as others, such as sweetfunny and ssandecki.

There is an old, OLD saying that applies equally well here - too many chefs (or in this case, SEOs) will ruin the recipe (or in this case, rankings).

 

Well damn dude that's a long post lol.
Anyway I agree with him, don't spend that much money on SEO. I mean It's really not that hard to do. Spend it on Adsense or some other form of advertisement. A good layout makes a good impression so you might want to spend it on that.
Well good luck... I'd do a million and one things with 10k for SEO lol, I hope it works out for you.

 

Except that a bad design may get less organic links than a good design.

 

If I was going to drop $10,000 on something I would make sure I did more research than just posting on a forum. No offense to previous posters of course, they do have some good information but I wouldn't want to waste that kind of money needlessly.

 

Don't you mean AdWords? AdSense is for publishers, not advertisers.

Which is why I said from a technical, not psychological, standpoint.

 

wow...10k for SEO

I would actually split them up for SEO and SEM.

 

yes my friend. For your competitive market (life insurance brokrage) i think$10000 is good...
best of luck!

 

i haven't see such a bad post earlier. People are doing marketing on a place which has been made for Social Help. Really ridiculus.

 

There are plenty of good suggestions here for you. I would seriously wait on spending the money right away. After you have developed your content, optimized and your framework strategy for SERP ranking do a small test on SEM and gradual SEO.

If you think you are going to easily jump hoops above the Internet Savvy insurance industry and stay their for good, you certainly have a very hard up hill battle.

If your SEM or SEO firm is on the ball they will forecast your quarterly efforts and give you semi-accurate milestone deliveries to ensure you meet a variety of goals as opposed to staying focused on highly-competitive area.

Granted you have 10K, it will work for you, but is it money well spent if you can't keep up with others doing the same.

My suggestions, do not commit to anything long-term and try to get a feasibility plan from them soon as or before you engage with the SEO firm.

"Do it yourself and teach others"
Florida Search Engine Optimization Company
Internet Marketing Consultant

 

Dan's answer was fantastic. My advice would be to print it out.

 

Dan's response was quite informative and useful.

My only advice is to work with a SEO professional through the site development process so that you don't have to go back and make major changes. You would be surprised at the simple mistakes designers can make which can cause significant SEO issues.

Good luck

 

If you have a good link building strategy in place and your onpage SEO is strong it shouldn't be a problem. Regardless of what some people say the age of your domain name will come into play. If you have been sitting on the domain name for a while without building backlinks you most likely won't rank well for about a year.

While the phrase may be competitive it's not extremely competitive. There are about 147,000 people competing for the exact phrase http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...cd=1&q=allintitle:term+life+insurance&spell=1. The top 10 on Google all have strong websites but they are ALL targeting other keywords which is great news for you.

Another thing is that 4 of the websites in the top 10 have a subpage of their website ranking for that phrase. It's much easier to get your top level URL to rank for a specific phrase so you have that in your favor as well.

It took me about 2 months to break into the top 30 for "make money online" which has 514,000 direct competitors. That's just an example of what a well thought out strategy can achieve in a short period of time.