SEOs and engineers could you hire for that amount?
Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2024 4:00 am
How many Here's another thought: if eBay commissioned an SEO audit every single month, and each audit only produced one insight worth implementing, and that one insight increased their SEO income by only 0.1%, they could justify a price of $280,000 per audit ($3.3 million per year). Or forgetting about audits for a moment, do you think a team of SEOs ($3.3 mil can buy a lot of headcount) could generate one insight worth 0.
1% in lift every month? Here’s another example: eBay spent over $2.5 billion on algeria phone number database sales and marketing in 2020: Table showing eBay spent over $2.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2020. And here is the rough breakdown of their traffic according to SimilarWeb: Pie chart showing the breakdown of Ebay traffic according to SimilarWeb. Traffic/channel to eBay.com according to SimilarWeb How much of that $2.5 billion should be spent on SEO? We can use our earlier estimate of SEO's 22% traffic share representing an 11% income share to guide this.
Should SEO get 11% of eBay's marketing budget to match its share of income? 5%? 2%? At 1% that would represent an investment of $25 million per year. What could you do with a $25 million per year investment into SEO? Hire a 50-person SEO team of engineers, analysts, and SEO experts at $200,000 per year each ($10 million) Hire five agencies on retainer at $50,000 per month each ($3 million) Hire a 50-person team of strong content writers at $100,000 per year each ($5 million) Spend $2 million a year on tooling Admire the remaining $5 million per year Okay, last one! Here are some recent case studies from SearchPilot outlining the impact of relatively small SEO projects: Reprioritizing of content on the page = 16% lift Adding internal links = 7% lift Bringing content out of tabs = 12% lift Adding month and year to title tags = 5% lift Adding review schema markup = 20% lift Let’s say: Those projects only affect 20% of the site (a lift of 10% would actually be a sitewide lift of 10% * 20%) 50% of your SEO work produces a lift The average lift is 5% You ship two projects per month Those are pretty conservative assumptions, and yet would produce a sitewide SEO lift of 12% per year or about $34 million in income per year for eBay.
1% in lift every month? Here’s another example: eBay spent over $2.5 billion on algeria phone number database sales and marketing in 2020: Table showing eBay spent over $2.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2020. And here is the rough breakdown of their traffic according to SimilarWeb: Pie chart showing the breakdown of Ebay traffic according to SimilarWeb. Traffic/channel to eBay.com according to SimilarWeb How much of that $2.5 billion should be spent on SEO? We can use our earlier estimate of SEO's 22% traffic share representing an 11% income share to guide this.
Should SEO get 11% of eBay's marketing budget to match its share of income? 5%? 2%? At 1% that would represent an investment of $25 million per year. What could you do with a $25 million per year investment into SEO? Hire a 50-person SEO team of engineers, analysts, and SEO experts at $200,000 per year each ($10 million) Hire five agencies on retainer at $50,000 per month each ($3 million) Hire a 50-person team of strong content writers at $100,000 per year each ($5 million) Spend $2 million a year on tooling Admire the remaining $5 million per year Okay, last one! Here are some recent case studies from SearchPilot outlining the impact of relatively small SEO projects: Reprioritizing of content on the page = 16% lift Adding internal links = 7% lift Bringing content out of tabs = 12% lift Adding month and year to title tags = 5% lift Adding review schema markup = 20% lift Let’s say: Those projects only affect 20% of the site (a lift of 10% would actually be a sitewide lift of 10% * 20%) 50% of your SEO work produces a lift The average lift is 5% You ship two projects per month Those are pretty conservative assumptions, and yet would produce a sitewide SEO lift of 12% per year or about $34 million in income per year for eBay.