SEO (search engine optimization) is an incredibly young and volatile marketing realm. As a marketing manager with great expectations for SEO, you likely feel intense pressure to generate a great ROI, but you also feel dizzy from the possibilities and risks inherent to any internet marketing adventure.

Before you and your accounting team pull out your calculators and Excel spreadsheets, you MUST organize your strategic marketing goals. If you don’t spell out these goals explicitly – and harmonize them with your vision for your company – you will burn up your investment and fast. Think of building a budget for SEO like designing a house. Unless and until you select the right neighborhood and style of house (vision) and map out the architectural skeleton (strategy), you will be hammering nails (budgeting tactics) essentially at random. And this will inevitably lead to a big mess.

That said, let’s get down into the nitty gritty and discuss SEO budgeting tactics that work.

Three ways to gauge a project’s budget:

• base your numbers on a (successful) past campaign that’s similar to yours.

• designate a target percentage of total sales you wish to achieve though SEO marketing and work backwards to make this figure a reality.

• aim to capture a specific share of your SEO market, and work backwards (based on figures published by competitors) to determine what SEO resources to deploy and where.

What percentage of your total marketing budget should go into SEO internet marketing:

• if you’re selling pharmaceuticals or herbal products, you may want to go as high as 25, but this figure will likely grow as SEO gains prominence as a marketing tool.

• If you advertise primarily in the brick-and-mortar realm and/or have an unusual online demographic, your percentage could dip to 2 of all business traffic generated from Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines comes from organic listings.

• every month, nearly 6 billion search engine queries are made.

• The top three search returns generate over 91 percent of traffic.

Unlock your SEO budget with the help of SearchMar.com, a full-spectrum website analytics company with enormous B2B experience.