It is imperative to allocate budget to fund the management of our site if you want your site to be successfully keep growing with your business. Without proper management your site is little more than a billboard type of advertisement, when in fact it should be viewed as a major form of marketing and branding for your product.

However a fair amount of technical knowledge is involved in site management and this costs money. What goes into site management is involved. It requires constant attention to details such as content, building and maintaining links, testing usability of the site and being able to design and generate reports for analysis.

Options available for managing your site are to either outsource or employ somebody in-house. A basic job spec for employment would read something like this. This person has to have graphic design capabilities as well as web programming skills. They must possess Good Copywriting skills in order to write good content and must be a fundi in SEO practices and have a very detailed knowledge base about web technologies. They have to be a business analyst and be able to forecast future business trends. After reading the list, you may have to employ a team.

Outsourcing is often a good idea, but can come with a hefty price tag, however they do have a place for smaller companies who are not able to fund a team of experts to manage their sites on a full time basis.

Ammunition

So, the decision makers have to be convinced that a budget needs to be set aside for managing your website, and quite often this entails new funding. But the alternative is to allow your website to die a slow death. There is enough research and information available to help you convince senior management that this form of marketing is strategic and is cost effective in the long run, especially when it is compared with other forms of marketing like media. Web management also attracts a unique form of client, return on investment and branding compared to other forms of marketing.

How much funding is enough?

As always marketing budgets are usually spoken about in percentages, that is, a percentage of the company’s sales, so the amount allocated varies from business to business. Some companies allocate a large percentage while others only need to allocate a small percentage; it all depends on the nature of the product. It is best to investigate what is the ‘norm’ in your industry.

Information about your website needs to be taken into account too, information regarding content, keywords, history of performance and what your Current Ranking is. This will have to be analysed by a competent business analyst who needs to determine best practice and what services will be required.

Tools

Whatever your budget, site management cannot be accomplished without maintenance tools and training of staff who will be using them. However, that being said, funding for SEO Management can be customized to fit any size budget, but it cannot and should not be ignored or omitted from your business plan.

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