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What happens when you invest $3000 and work one day per month on your SEO over 12 months?
The illustration below will show you the exciting details 📈
Here are the main takeaways:
- After 11 months your total balance will be positive (more money made than spent)
- Every month thereafter will give you a growing gross profit.
- After 24 months you will have made a 7x return on your initial $3000 investment (measured in gross profit)
Where do the numbers come from?
First of all: Any attempt to show the business effect of marketing in a simple formula will fail on precision. Industries are different, efforts are different and we could go on …
The graph is an average across 25 companies in 12 different industries where I have insight into revenue (via Google Analytics) and efforts – anonymously.
At the same time, I have downgraded the results by 30%, to ensure that the figures are conservative
- Typical company: 5-year-old webshop, consultancy, or service company
- No previous SEO done in most cases
Download the SEO budget spreadsheet
If you want a detailed month by month overview and play around with the data in a spreadsheet visit this link: Get Google spreadsheet
How to edit this budget:
1. Click “File” in the menu.
2. If you are logged into a Google account you can make a copy and edit it in Google Sheets with this button.
3. Or if not logged in or you want it in Excel for example click on Download instead
4. And then choose the format you want.
Are the numbers 1:1 applicable to my business?
Every case is unique. If you want advice on how to invest, we do offer that advice for free as part of a video demo of our SEO tool Morningscore.
We go through your website to see how it performs on Google and give you a suggested plan to work on.
If you are interested you can book a demo here:
Book free demo of Morningscore
Bonus: Exploring the numbers
We dive a bit more into the numbers below.
Year 2 explained
Now let’s look at the second year of your SEO investment.
In year 2, it is assumed that you spend the same per month as in December of year 1 = $100 x 12 months = $1,200
This means you are maintaining your SEO. But just maintaining a “rolling snowball” still brings in fairly big growth.
Year 2 total spend
$1,200
Year 2 total profit
$25,920
Year 2 results
$24,720
Conclusion on the 2 years of investment
the initial investment was $3,000.
At the end of year 1, the result was +$2,700
At the end of year 2, the result was +$24,720
Combining the profits of years 1 and 2 gives a total return on investment of $27,420 after 2 years.
What if I invested way more than $3,000?
Of course, these numbers are easily scalable:
If you invested $30,000 upfront instead of $3,000 and you spent the money well, the return of investment would be close to $240,000 after 36 months instead.
There is definitely an upper limit to the size of the initial investment you could do, but depending on the size of your market, that limit is quite high. Possibly in the millions.
