SEO spend allocation to own your niche — Tom Wells // Wells & Harris

Tom Wells, Co-Founder of Wells & Harris, talks about the changes and power of SEO data. SEO is often undervalued in comparison to paid search even though the ROI from organic search can be phenomenal when it’s done well. If clickthrough rates are any indication, it’s imperative that brands invest in SEO, but it must be done strategically for positive results. Today, Tom discusses SEO spend allocation to own your niche.
About the speaker

Tom Wells

Wells & Harris

 - Wells & Harris

Tom is Co-Founder of Wells & Harris

Show Notes

  • 02:14
    How to prioritize SEO in your digital marketing strategy today
    SEO should be a top priority for brands, and it should be a part of a holistic strategy. So, the data from SEO efforts can be used to optimize your paid strategy and ensure the user experience is optimized.
  • 03:23
    Allocating marketing investments effectively
    Brands need to allocate spend to SEO, but they need to develop a strategic roadmap to ensure success. While budget allocation will vary based on your niche, marketing investments like SEO and paid search should be viewed as a whole.
  • 05:32
    Justifying investments in SEO
    Research indicates that organic search is considered just as important as paid search by top brands. By ranking organically, you can establish trust and authority with people and with Google.
  • 07:35
    Why its critical to understand your niche before allocating spend
    In order to spend less and establish domain authority, you must focus on satisfying the queries of your target audience. Thats why you have to understand your niche and what users are searching for so that your content provides the best answers.
  • 09:34
    The budget allocation required to master a niche
    The first step is to conduct research on where you and your competitors are currently as well as trends in the industry. Ideally, 5% of your annual budget should be allocated to strategic research before bigger allocations are made to the other required pillars.
  • 10:48
    How to own a niche
    Use strategic research to identify your competitors, how theyre spending, and how users feel about them. Ultimately, your research should help you determine how you can be better than your competitors and outperform them.
  • 12:29
    How to effectively allocate spend across multiple channels
    You have to understand the metrics you should be measuring and how accurate the numbers from analytics platforms are in relation to those metrics. Through that understanding, youll be able to compare performance between the channels and determine allocation for each.

Quotes

  • "I believe that an effective brand typically looks at SEO as a cornerstone, but can learn from all of that data to optimize their paid strategy as well." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "The marketing unit should look at investments as a whole and make a strategic roadmap for their success over the next year, two years, three years, and take a bigger picture." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "SEO is undervalued and my research says that the SEO spend versus paid is roughly 10% of what people are spending on search ads right now." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "Organic search is a journey. It's going to take some time, particularly if you haven't established your niche beforehand to begin ranking for those high-value terms." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "A key part of the strategy that is the most overlooked is first understanding the niche before dropping spend into it." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "Id put at least 5% into strategic research upfront, before moving on to the bigger allocations of technical optimization, spending on content, refreshing content, and those other pillars you need." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

  • "When forming Wells & Harris, we went out of our way to develop our own system, metrics, and create our view of the market where we can compare UX, SEO, and paid as one holistic picture." -Tom Wells, Co-Founder, Wells & Harris

About the speaker

Tom Wells

Wells & Harris

 - Wells & Harris

Tom is Co-Founder of Wells & Harris

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