Search Engine Marketing Budgets and ROI

Is Search Engine Marketing worth the cost?

For most commercial web sites serious about doing business online the answer is an unequivocal YES. Ultimately, however, only you can answer this question based on your own particular circumstances.

Here we show you how to:

• Calculate a search engine marketing budget
• Analyse the ROI of a search engine marketing campaign

Whilst you want to get good rankings in the key search engines and directories, this is not an end in itself. The real objective is getting increased qualified traffic to your site.

Increased traffic to a website is like getting increased foot traffic through a store - it increases the number of prospects you have the opportunity to sell to and turn into customers.

As with any marketing investment you will want to satisfy yourself that the funds invested will generate an adequate return on investment and so aren't wasted.

Measuring the return on investment of many marketing efforts is extremely difficult – if not impossible. This is exemplified by the famous quote of advertising guru David Ogilvy “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”  

The good news is that the performance of search engine marketing can be readily measured. Not only this, search engine marketing has one of the highest marketing ROIs.

Next topic: Calculating a search engine marketing budget