Introduction
Discover how to optimize your enterprise SEO strategy with minimal in-house marketing budgets by implementing tactics that only require payment upon success.
Your CEO is interested in the significance of your SEO team in the company’s overall strategy.
The CFO is concerned about adhering to your limited marketing budget.
At the same time, shareholders demand a higher return on investment (ROI) without incurring high costs.
So, how do you turn your SEO team into an ROI juggernaut without straining your budget?
We will demonstrate how to enhance your ROI by updating your keyword ranking approach and exploring untapped SEO techniques for enterprise teams.
We will guide you in working more efficiently with a smaller in-house marketing budget.
1. Attract More Qualified Visitors: Incorporate Mid-Volume Keywords into Your SEO Approach
You’re familiar with the scenario. Your CEO wants millions of visitors to your site with minimal expenditure.
Enter SEO
Your SEO team concentrates on high-volume and branded keywords to ensure an increase in traffic flow.
However, as website traffic grows, shareholders focus on the next crucial metric – return on investment (ROI).
Suddenly, your CEO requests conversion data and inquires about the time spent on each conversion:
- How many hours were dedicated to nurturing each visitor?
- How many nurtured visitors turned into sales?
- How many dropped out of an extended marketing funnel?
- How many visitors are converting into actual profit?
- Is this effort financially worthwhile?
You then realize that high-volume and branded keywords primarily attract top-of-the-funnel visitors or people far from making a purchase.
The initial excitement fades – your marketing team spent hundreds of hours nurturing top-funnel visitors to the consideration stage, with only 4.31% of visitors converting.
Each nurturing hour reduces SEO’s ROI.
It’s time to ensure that leads entering your site are closer to the conversion phase of your marketing funnel.
After all, less work to convert a visitor into profit means higher ROI.
The solution: Shift your SEO team’s focus toward integrating more mid-volume and low-volume keywords into your SEO strategy.
Why Should I Allocate SEO Resources to Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords?
To ensure your website leads are closer to conversion, allocate SEO resources to mid- and low-volume keywords.
What is the ROI Disparity Between High-Volume and Mid-/Low-Volume Keywords?
High-volume keywords, such as short-tail terms like [iPhone 14] or [Android], are highly effective for generating awareness and attracting traffic. However, as the visitors who find your site using high-volume, short-tail keywords are typically in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, the conversion rate for these visitors is only around 3%.
On the other hand, mid-volume and low-volume keywords, including long-tail phrases like [buy 256GB iPhone 14 pro max], boast a conversion rate of 23% while requiring less effort to achieve.
How to Boost ROI with Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords
To include mid- and low-volume keywords (a.k.a long-tail keywords) in your SEO approach, repeat your in-house keyword research strategy, focusing on search intent.
Repeating your initial keyword research with search intent will naturally help you discover the long-tail keywords needed to attract more qualified leads and search visibility.
The Easy Way
Need the budget to repeat keyword research for more qualified search terms?
Consider:
- Hands-on pay-for-performance SEO agencies that merge your existing keyword strategy with a balanced mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. As a bonus, you only pay for results, no budget-wasting retainers.
- Automated SEO tools, which still require bandwidth for setup and quality control.
2. Assess the True ROI of Your SEO Strategy: Minimize Unnecessary Marketing Expenses
Being strategic with your resource allocation is the second key to higher ROI.
Assess:
- Marketing teams’ alignment with SEO goals
- Streamlining and automation of basic SEO tasks for improved bandwidth and innovation from key team members
- Outsourced SEO strategy components and their impact on net profit
If the answer to these questions is negative, you may reduce your SEO results’ ROI.
Concentrate on these critical areas to address your marketing budget’s most significant unnecessary drains.
Cost Reduction Strategy 1: Boost Success by Aligning Content Marketing, PPC, & SEO
Saving bandwidth costs and enhancing optimization and campaign management can be achieved by sharing strategies and data among marketing teams.
Disconnected enterprise marketing teams can rapidly become a major source of budget depletion.
In 2022, 13.9% of marketing managers and department heads identified collaboration with other departments as a significant barrier to SEO success.
However, by implementing comprehensive interdepartmental cooperation, the ROI of SEO strategies can swiftly improve.
The Problem: When PPC, content marketing, and SEO teams don’t collaborate, ROI can be considerably diminished. Overlapping content can lead to cannibalization, duplicated work, and more.
Additional expenses for conversions arise from the cost of redundant work, instructional meetings, and strategy adjustments.
The Solution: Minimize repetitive work and elevate ROI by:
- Leveraging reliable data from recent campaigns.
- Expedite SEO research by utilizing successful PPC ad copy as the foundation for SERP titles and meta descriptions.
- Merging and sharing PPC and SEO keyword research.
- Exchanging Google Ads and Search Console data between teams to reduce experimentation time and prevent errors.
- Determining SERP ownership and assigning ad spend to more competitive SERPs.
- Identifying and consolidating content pages competing with SEO-focused pages, and then collaborating to allocate content creation resources toward new, high-ROI objectives.
By minimizing work duplication for the same conversion, ROI can be increased rapidly.
Cost Reduction Tip 2: Efficiently Streamline & Automate SEO Tasks
In 2022, most marketing managers and department heads cited a need for more resources as their largest obstacle to SEO success.
The Problem: ROI suffers when teams are overburdened, leading to a decline in high-quality output and an increase in errors.
Correcting mistakes consumes time, and for CEOs, time equates to money deducted from ROI.
The Solution: Enhance ROI by adopting AI and machine learning tools that save time and empower your teams to deliver superior work.
Time saved equals reduced conversion costs, which translates to increased ROI.
AI and machine learning can decrease conversion costs by up to 20%, with productivity improvements accounting for up to 70% of the cost reduction.
Begin by pinpointing simple SEO tasks that can be automated and taken off your team’s plate.
AI can efficiently automate time-intensive tasks and boost SEO performance through:
- SERP anomaly identification.
- Updating ranking and traffic reports.
- Creating backlink profiles.
- Collecting manual SEO data.
- Sourcing backlinks.
- Generating initial keyword research reports.
- Conducting topic research and outlining articles.
- By allowing tools and AI to perform these tasks, you’ll experience:
- Quicker paths to scalability and growth within your SEO team structure. Fewer costly mistakes and correction periods, as your team can focus on quality instead of rushing to complete tasks.
- Less time is spent on time-consuming work, allowing your team to concentrate on impactful strategy and collaboration.
- Each of these elements directly influences SEO ROI.
Cost Reduction Tip 3: Evaluate the ROI of Outsourced SEO
Your CFO and CEO are highly focused on operating costs versus profit.
It would be best if you were, too.
Outsourcing SEO tasks addresses any bandwidth issues your marketing team faces, but how can you determine if the retainer cost is worth the ROI?
The Problem: ROI drops when retainers come into play.
When there’s an expense simply because your company signed a contract or because the agency requires a few months of setup time, proving that your agency choice was a smart decision could be challenging.
The Solution: Understanding how retainers impact your ROI can help you present a clearer picture of success.
Calculate your SEO strategy’s ROI, including retainer costs plus the time it takes to reach page one.
- When does your outsourced SEO agency expect results to start showing?
- How many months of the retainer will you be paying before that?
- How much money could you save by paying only for results?
In this scenario, the first SEO results appear around month four.
With traditional SEO billing, you’ve already spent $4,000 for the first conversions.
With pay-for-performance SEO billing, you’ve only paid $450 for the first conversions.
After analyzing the cost impact of your current retainers, consider exploring other types of SEO agencies.
See also: When Is The Appropriate Moment To Conduct a Content Audit for SEO?
3. Seek Top Talent: Transform Your SEO Team into a High-Impact Powerhouse
Hiring new SEO professionals, similar to finding the perfect SEO agency, can be an ROI-draining gamble. Identify specific traits in the ideal enterprise SEO candidate to positively impact your ROI.
Traits to Look for in Your Next Enterprise SEO Hire
Apart from critical thinking, excellent speaking and writing abilities, technical and programming skills, and analytics knowledge, seek the following key enterprise SEO traits:
- In-depth knowledge of your business and its vertical(s).
- SEO reporting expertise and the ability to communicate results that matter to your CEO.
- A strong foundational understanding of search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking processes.
- Experience in creating and maintaining technical documentation.
- Profound experience with AI-assisted SEO tools and platforms. A multidisciplinary approach with a collaborative nature.
By building your enterprise SEO team around these skillsets, you will naturally direct your team toward high-quality, high-ROI results.
Effortlessly Scale Your SEO Department Without Recruitment Costs
With many marketing and SEO budgets lower than usual this year, hiring might not be included in your budget. However, you can scale your SEO program without hiring costly in-house SEO teams by working with an affordable pay-for-performance agency like ResultFirst.
4. Incorporate Pay-Per-Performance SEO into Your Strategy
Onboarding a new SEO agency can lead to an initial drop in ROI as you await results. Sometimes, it may take up to six months to see the first true SEO results from a retainer SEO contract, causing your conversion value to be much lower than your CPC.
An excellent alternative to traditional SEO agency models is the pay-for-performance (PFP) SEO model. While collaborating with your PPC team for prompt visibility on SERPs, a PFP agency can begin working on your search visibility for free.
What is Pay-For-Performance SEO?
Pay-For-Performance (PFP) SEO is a performance-based service model in which you are charged only when your SEO campaign succeeds, and your goals are achieved.
You are charged only after you reach the desired ranking for your top keywords. PFP SEO primarily aims to boost rankings, increase web traffic, and drive more revenue through:
- Industry Analysis.
- Competitor Analysis.
- Keyword Research.
- Comprehensive Website Audit.
- Backlink Acquisitions.
- Complete On-Page SEO Recommendations.
Pay-For-Performance SEO addresses your financial challenges by enabling your company to achieve better results with less marketing expenditure.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, optimizing your enterprise SEO strategy doesn’t have to break the bank. By focusing on mid- and low-volume keywords, auditing your SEO strategy for inefficiencies, seeking top talent, and incorporating pay-per-performance SEO, you can effectively boost your SEO ROI without incurring overhead costs.
These approaches will not only help you save money but also enable you to grow your digital marketing initiatives, outperform your competition, and achieve better results with limited resources. Embrace these strategies and watch your business thrive as you maximize your return on investment.
Read Next: How to Maximize Your ROI: Investing in Paid Advertising and SEO
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