A modern business’s success begins with SEO. Before they can patronize your store, customers need to find it, and the modern way to do that is on their smartphones via search engines. Today we’re going to look at a snapshot of the modern landscape of SEO, including how much businesses pay, what SEO experts actually do with their time, and the importance of SEO in a post-pandemic world.

All facts and figures were provided by Search Engine Journal in a survey of 1241 SEO professionals.

The short and predictable answer is: it depends. The longer version is that much like any other service, you get what you pay for.

The most common monthly SEO budget is between $1000 to $5000, with agencies providing most of that number.

In the past year, a little over 50% of SEO budgets have increased, while 24% have stayed the same. If you’re slashing your SEO budget, you’re rapidly losing ground in the fight for relevance and brand recognition.

How do SEO experts spend their time?

SEO has many different elements, each one of which could quite easily be its own job. These include keyword analysis, on-page SEO, technical SEO, analytics, mobile SEO, audience research, local SEO, and link-building.

Any good SEO firm will devote some of their time to all of these factors. An important note: Technical SEO requires a lot of time up front, but once it’s in place, it can be maintained for less time and energy. Link-Building tends to be the hardest of these tasks, since it requires other sites and excellent networking skills. Both of these are absolutely vital to a good SEO strategy.

If you’re slashing your SEO budget, you’re rapidly losing ground in the fight for relevance and brand recognition.

How have budgets changed?

I gave you a bit of a spoiler earlier when I pointed out that a little over half of all budgets have increased. There’s an excellent reason for this: traffic.

Over the past year, respondents reported that site traffic was up 64.2%. This astounding figure makes perfect sense: people were cooped up at home and did more web browsing than usual.

Right now when a lot of dealerships are considering cutting their SEO budgets, you should be doing the exact opposite. Take advantage of the increased web traffic to build your brand.

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Author Justin Robinson-Prickett

Justin Robinsion-Prickett is a content writer from Los Angeles with over a decade of experience in the auto industry under his belt. When not working, he enjoys fencing, re-editing dialogue in old movies to remove articles, and playing with his two dogs James Westphal and Dr. Kenneth Noisewater.

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