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Quality Content
The cornerstone of a great SEO campaign is useful content that is easily marketable and highly shareable and uses key topics that are highly relevant to your business. Five hundred dollars will barely cover a few pieces of such content, which requires the services of skilled copywriters and talented editors. Though it's certainly tempting to outsource your content to services that court the lowest bidder, such a scheme is sure to net poor content that won't have the same ability to perform well in search results, especially as Google has been cracking down on keyword-stuffed low-quality content in recent months, according to Yahoo Small Business.
Key Topic Research
One of the cornerstones of an effective SEO campaign is the ability to select and use high-impact keywords in content. However, these key phrases don't just appear out of thin air — they require dedicated time and effort to research. Not investing in key topic research can rob your content of any search potential it had, and even worse, result in negative SEO effects as less-effective key topics are used instead.
Measurable Performance
Though much of an SEO campaign budget is used for research and content creation, some must be set aside for measuring how well the campaign is doing. If you don't spend time and money to see which parts of your campaign are working well (and which could be optimized further), it becomes impossible to know where future efforts should be placed. This leaves your marketing department in the unfortunate position of having no direction, which will almost certainly spell disaster for future SEO efforts.
Though a low-ball pitch to help fix glaring SEO issues might sound enticing, the fact is that a successful SEO campaign needs to be well-funded to be successful. Though budget cuts are a fact in any business model, shrinking your SEO marketing budget down to a number that won't secure a return on investment, and worse, may actually work negatively for you, is only hurting your business.
