SEO experience
What I took from the consultations and projects I have run, when it comes to a site budget, is that everyone wants to spend the least and get the best result. That is not budget optimization.
A few people are the opposite: they spend heavily and still get it wrong, and many of them invest in the wrong place entirely. The amusing part is how much they then expect from an SEO specialist or consultant.
To those people I say this: before anything else, check the following items, then start the work you have in mind.
First, use site: to count the indexed pages of competitor sites and go through their content. See how much content they have and take an average word count. Average the cost per word at between 100 and 140 Toman.
Then, with an Ahrefs account or other tools, pull their number of backlinks and sponsored posts.
Next, visit the platforms that sell those sponsored posts and get their prices. Look only at news agencies and magazines. After that, search the job sites and check those same companies’ hiring ads, to see how much workforce they keep in each department and what that staff costs them.
With just those few tasks you can estimate the SEO budget your project needs. Then look at your own pocket and decide whether you can succeed in that business, or whether you can compete at all, because those two are different. Once competition is the subject, the story is that whatever a rival did, your site has to do the same thing better or in greater volume, and spend more. Some people do optimize the budget with different strategies and succeed, although there are fewer of them than the fingers on one hand.
The question of succeeding is separate. We may not have enough budget for our costs, but putting time into a business can make it successful. It may take a few years and reach its results later. For example, if a business that spends reaches results after 6 months, the same business without spending may take two years. And if our budget is half that of our competitors, we should know not to expect extraordinary things from our specialists. In the best case you reach page one after 6 to 9 months, assuming the competition on your topics is medium to low — and even that only if you have no SEO problem at all and only a budget problem, and the specialists working on your site applied the best strategies. With the budget you allocated, that ranking is the best available result.
Site SEO consulting
From my consultations, my projects and the people who keep asking me questions, I understood this: although everyone only wants results quickly, they do not spend anything either. Or they think that hiring one excellent SEO person is enough to get the best result, and I have to say that is wrong. Good SEO work has its place and spending has its place; the two have to sit side by side for a site to succeed. It is like hiring the best architect in the city and having no money to build the building. The rest of the team deserves attention too. Plenty of people are not willing to spend 5 million Toman a month, yet expect to take 5 billion out of it. If such a thing existed, there would be no poverty on Earth and everyone would be a billionaire. The short version is this: do not enter something you know nothing about, research whatever you do, and count each item one by one. One more thing I forgot — look at how old the competitor sites are, so you do not expect to grow that fast…
Those with a small budget have no reason to worry either. Just bring your expectations down, focus on the keywords with less competition, earn income from the site, and spend the profit from your business on growing the site so you reach results sooner. That method takes far more time, though, and you have to work harder.
Omid Bodagh
I am an SEO specialist who likes helping businesses get seen on Google. From WordPress to SEO, whatever an online business needs to grow, I can help with it.