Clients always ask: "How much should we spend on SEO?"
The answer isn't a number. It's a formula.
Here's the budget calculator framework: 🧵
1/ The wrong way to budget:
Most companies pick arbitrary numbers:
❌ "Let's spend $2K/month" (based on what?)
❌ "Whatever competitors spend" (different goals)
❌ "What we have left over" (recipe for failure)
❌ "10% of marketing budget" (no logic)
Budget should be based on goals and market reality.
2/ The SEO budget formula:
Monthly SEO Budget = (Goal Revenue ÷ Conversion Value) × Cost Per Acquisition ÷ 12
Variables you need:
- Annual revenue goal from SEO
- Average customer value
- Target conversion rate
- Competitive difficulty score
- Current domain authority
Client spent $15K on content.
$10K on link building.
$5K on technical optimization.
Traffic still sucked.
The problem? $5/month shared hosting.
Server response time: 3.2 seconds.
Google crawled 80% less than competitors.
Switched hosting → traffic increased 210% in 5 weeks: 🧵👇
1/ Server response time kills rankings
TTFB (Time to First Byte) matters:
Under 200ms: Excellent
200-500ms: Good
500ms-1s: Problematic
Over 1s: Rankings killer
Client's cheap hosting:
- TTFB: 3,200ms
- Google crawled slowly
- Crawl budget wasted
- Pages took weeks to index
Competitor on good hosting:
- TTFB: 180ms
- Google crawled aggressively
- Fast indexing
2/ The shared hosting disaster
Shared hosting problems:
- Share server with 100+ sites
- One site gets traffic spike → your site slows
- Limited resources (CPU, RAM)
- Slow database queries
- No server-level caching
Client on GoDaddy shared:
- 500 sites on same server
- Neighbor site got DDoS attack
- Client's site went down
- Google couldn't crawl for 3 days
- Rankings tanked