Let's talk money.
Most businesses allocate their SEO budget in one of two ways:
Both approaches are bad. Let me show you a better way.
How much should you spend on SEO?
The honest answer: it depends on your revenue, your competition, and your growth goals.
But here are some rough benchmarks from 500+ campaigns:
Where to allocate your budget
40% - Content creation
Content is the engine. Blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, guides, and tools.
But not just any content. Content mapped to keyword research, search intent, and your sales funnel.
25% - Technical SEO
Site speed. Crawlability. Mobile experience. Schema markup. Core Web Vitals.
This is the foundation everything else sits on. Neglect it and nothing else works properly.
20% - Link building / Digital PR
Quality backlinks from relevant sites. Guest posts. Digital PR campaigns. Resource link building.
Don't buy links. Earn them. It's slower but infinitely more sustainable.
15% - Tools and tracking
Analytics. Rank tracking. Audit tools. And a system to track all your SEO tasks.
Speaking of which...
The free part
Here's the good news.
Your SEO task management system doesn't need to cost anything.
SEO Checkup is free. 113 tasks. 4 checklists. Priority levels. Step-by-step tutorials. Status tracking.
No credit card. 30 seconds to set up.
Put the money you save on task management toward content and link building instead.
That's smart budgeting. If you need help proving SEO ROI to justify the spend, we wrote a whole guide for that too.