A friend of mine who is an economics professor sent me this from the Global TED in Oxford.

“The wonderful Rory Sutherland wows the audience at the TED conference in Oxford with a superb sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioural economics.” As a repentant ad guy, it’s refreshing to see a “practising” ad guy leading the way for less is more. Enjoy!

October is usually the month that companies are working on budget for the next year, so I wanted to be prompt in reminding you that the continual improvement offered by site optimization is a great investment.

We talk to a lot of companies who a) didn’t know they were missing 90+ percent of their potential new prospects by having an unoptimized site, b) had no idea they would need to rework their website to reach these people, and c) didn’t budget for it. Well, what other marketing investment is going to increase your leads and web sales by 50-100%? That makes the ROI on the investment easy to figure out.

If you don’t know what it’s going to cost to fix your site, talk to a good SEO agency now, discuss your options, and make sure you include enough money to do the substantial work with content that will improve your rankings. Even if you only have $1000 a month to put toward working on the site, that’s still enough to effect positive change. We have clients who spend $250 a month, and clients who spend $5-10,000 a month on SEO. What you need for a search marketing budget really depends on what needs to be done…which is why we start with an audit or, for bigger companies, an audit with a thorough competitive analysis. That gives you a strategy and road map of how to get there…well worth the effort and the limited investment ($2500-4500). Our rule of thumb for B2B sites is to plan on spending $25-30K in the first year, and adjust based on your results.