SEO budgets: Where to invest for maximum impact as search evolves
With so many changes in search, where should you invest? Find out with our detailed guide and get our free SEO budget reallocation calculator.
With the rise of AI Overviews (AIO), the search landscape looks vastly different than it did just three years ago. SEO budgets are under pressure. Stakeholder interest in GEO is rising, which can cause budget misallocation; looking for the shiny new object rather than the thing that’s getting meaningful results.
The issue for SEO professionals is that clicks are dropping despite page one rankings, and paid ads are consuming more visible page real estate than ever before. Finding data to support budget increases can be tough to come by.
That means if you’re not targeting the right metrics, SEO investments are hard to secure. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With the correct investment strategies, SEO can still help businesses grow by attracting audiences that convert and buy. Plus, SEO is accountable for exposure in AI and brand building.
This article covers the five major SEO investment categories, typical budget ranges by business type, how shifting SERPs should change your allocation, and how to build a defensible budget case for leadership.
Track, grow, and measure your visibility across Google, AI search, social, local, and every channel that influences buying decisions.
The five major categories of SEO investment
People
No great SEO takes place without great people. Businesses that take SEO seriously need to allocate a sizable chunk of budget to people. It’s where you’ll feel the most impact if you get it wrong.
At a minimum, a successful SEO strategy needs three core skills covered:
- SEO strategy
- Content planning and production
- Technical implementation
Usually, you need a minimum of two people to execute this type of work; a creative person for content (strategy, planning and production) and a technical person for coding. It’s pretty rare that your content team is also technical and vice versa.
That said, there’s a lot more that goes into SEO than that, and other roles you might fill include:
- Designers
- Writers
- Digital PR experts
- Project Managers
- Video production
- And more
A good investment in people usually means having defined roles across skill sets. For example, someone who can create strategy, another for technical SEO, and another who keeps the projects moving.
Sometimes, people investments are made through internal hires and, when this happens, the internal team owns the strategy and is accountable for results. In this case, you might also hire external support, such as freelance writers, a marketing agency on a monthly retainer, or a contractor to fill skill gaps. Sometimes, the entire strategy is handled by an agency or contractors.
Wasted marketing spend occurs when businesses hire junior staff but set unrealistic expectations, like expecting them to manage strategy. Or, when businesses pay an agency but don’t provide goals or accountability, so nothing meaningful gets done. Alternatively, it’s also a big mistake to hire an agency with the intention of keeping up with their demands, like writing content, but failing to follow through.
Dig deeper: How to onboard an SEO agency the right way
Why people investment matters
SEO teams have always been challenged with change. Google updates its algorithm and priorities shift, but in recent years, SEO has experienced the biggest shift ever: the shift to AI search. Liz Read, Google’s VP of Search, describes the search engine as entering a new chapter of AI search. AI is no longer just a feature or a part of the search experience; Google Search is AI Search.
Search team members must work toward keeping brands relevant in Google and Gemini, while constructing strategies and executing tasks that lead to visibility, clicks, and conversions from other search tools like large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude. While the foundational work that SEO specialists have been putting in for years still contributes massively to AI search (also called AEO or GEO) on Google, every business needs an SEO team that cares about new updates and developing search behaviors.
In its documentation, Google states, “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
However, it’s important not to forget the bigger picture: People are not just searching on Google anymore and it takes a competent and invested individual to maintain interest in search behavior changes as they cross platforms.
Technology
Technology is a necessary SEO investment, but it’s one of the easiest places to overspend without noticing. Most SEO teams accumulate tools over time and end up paying for redundant tools when the functionality they actually utilize is available in just one.
Another common overspend issue occurs when subscriptions are billed annually. These paid-for tools get forgotten about, or sometimes SEO teams use the tools to handle a specific need, like reporting, but no one ends up reading the reports. The functionality isn’t useful anymore, but the bills keep coming. It’s really important that SEO teams run a tool stack audit every so often; quarterly is a good cadence. It doesn’t take long, but spotting tools that are being paid for but not used is a quick way to save some cash.
At a minimum, a solid SEO tech stack needs three things covered:
- Crawling and technical auditing
- Keyword research and competitive analysis
- Analytics and reporting
A good technology investment means every tool in your stack is earning its place. This means that every tool has a purpose, there’s little to no overlap, and, importantly, that your team is actually using the tools you’re paying for. Ideally, multiple teams or departments benefit from the tool.
Wasted spend looks like paying for five tools with overlapping functionality or investing in platforms your team doesn’t have the time or skill to use properly.
Important note: In modern-day SEO, AI tools are a must. It’s important to know how your brand fares in AI search, including visibility for the right prompts, and conversions and revenue.
Why investment in tools matters
SEO tools automate processes and provide continuous tracking of things like keyword and prompt tracking, or website performance. If a site suddenly has serious technical issues, a tool like Semrush will surface them immediately, whereas a human could miss it for weeks, months, or even years. In this respect, tools save money by saving websites from the potential impact of technical issues, and these tools keep humans working on meaningful tasks, so businesses aren’t paying for people to do menial tasks, like manually checking site performance.
Analytics and reporting tools such as Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Data Studio are among some of the few resources SEO teams have to connect search performance to marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and revenue, which helps SEO teams prove what’s working and allows financial teams to approve or justify larger budgets to stakeholders.
Without the right tools, teams end up guessing how to improve their SEO strategy and struggling to produce reports that connect SEO to bottom-line impact.
Content and authority/on-page SEO
After people, content is where the largest percentage of SEO budgets are spent, and this category is where the biggest strategic mistakes are often made.
Producing the wrong content, or producing it without a clear purpose, is one of the most common ways SEO investment gets wasted. And it’s a significant chunk of money, because businesses can end up paying for writers to produce content, then paying an SEO strategist to unpick hundreds of published pages. Sometimes the solution is content removal, which means it was all for nothing.
At minimum, a solid content investment needs to cover:
- New content creation
- Content refreshes
- On-page SEO optimization
That said, a well-rounded content strategy goes further than that, and other areas you might invest in include:
- Multimedia (video, infographics, interactive tools)
- Expert contributors
- Thought leadership
- First-party research (data you’ve acquired yourself)
A good content investment means every piece has a clear purpose, whether that’s targeting a specific keyword, supporting a buying decision, building brand authority, or earning citations in AI search.
Content pieces should also become an asset that benefits multiple marketing channels. For example, if SEO invests in a 3,000 word thought leadership piece, then other marketing teams should be able to repurpose it across other channels — like email or social media — so the investment compounds as more audiences discover the content and take desired actions, like visiting your site or getting in touch.
Wasted spend looks like producing new content targeting keywords that vaguely make sense, or writing new content when, in reality, you have existing content that just needs refreshing. Wasted spend on content marketing also looks like churning out pages using AI just for the sake of publishing.
Why content investment matters
The bar for content quality has risen sharply in recent years. After ChatGPT launched in 2022, Google adjusted its Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-A-T) guideline to include a new “E” for Experience; “E-A-T” became “E-E-A-T” and it feels fair to assume that Google did this because experience is the one thing that AI content cannot produce. The effort taken to produce good content is significant because it includes first-party research, genuine thought leadership, and content backed by named experts. This is what Google wants you to publish, helpful content that benefits people.
Dig deeper: An SEO Guide to Understanding E-E-A-T
Technical SEO
Technical SEO isn’t the most visible part of an SEO strategy, but it’s foundational for success. If Google can’t crawl a website, then indexing can’t happen, and no one will ever find it.
At a minimum, a solid technical SEO investment needs to cover:
- Site architecture and crawlability
- Core Web Vitals and page experience
- Structured data / schema markup
That said, the technical SEO scope grows with the size and complexity of a site, and other areas you might invest in include:
- Site migrations
- Log file analysis
- Canonicalization and duplicate content
- Indexation management
A good technical SEO investment includes a regular investment in people (often developers) to support SEO specialists who may have the skills to identify an issue, but not the specialized skills to resolve it. Tools are also a significant part of technical SEO because they automate critical checks and send timely notifications.
Good technical SEO investments may need to increase at critical milestones. For example, if a website migration project is coming up, then some extra budget should be allocated to SEO, especially technical SEO and content strategy. Website migration projects are renowned for causing significant SEO issues once live. An SEO specialist’s input early on maintains website performance and prevents issues, like losing clicks once the migration is complete.
Wasted spend looks like hiring teams to fix technical issues on pages that don’t really matter, running technical SEO audits without the development resource to act on findings, or treating technical SEO as a one-off project rather than an ongoing task.
Why technical SEO investment matters
Technical SEO issues can occur without anyone noticing, and, if this happens, the effect on the website can be catastrophic for brands. For example, an entire site could fall out of the index, meaning it’s nowhere to be found on Google, or mass 404 pages can lead to poor user experience (UX). Or poor canonicalization can impact rankings sitewide. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what can go wrong technically.
You might not notice technical SEO when everything is fine, but you could have a serious issue on your hands if something goes wrong. It’s one thing to invest in the tools required to manage technical SEO, but, once a tool has identified a problem, you need the people investment to make a judgement about how critical an error is, whether it’s really affecting business — and of course — they need the skills to fix the issue, too.
Dig deeper: Where to focus technical SEO when you can’t do it all
Brand building/off-page SEO
Often, off-page SEO refers to link building, but the term “link building” is a little reductive of what off-page SEO actually is. It also includes building your brand’s reputation and authority beyond your own website.
At a minimum, a solid off-page investment covers:
- Link building
- Brand building (usually through PR)
- Brand mentions and citations on credible websites
That said, a well-rounded off-page strategy will go further than that. Areas you might invest in include:
- Thought leadership and expert commentary
- Podcast appearances and speaking opportunities
- Community and social presence
A good off-page investment means earning coverage, links, and mentions from sources your audience and Google actually trust. This means sourcing backlinks from highly respected industry publications rather than getting links from just any publication. It’s about quality over quantity, and that comes with a cost, be it time spent nurturing relationships or physical payment for brand placements in leading publications. A good off-page investment usually means that it’s going into PR because PR builds brands. Sometimes, link strategies can build authority on websites without offering much else.
Wasted spend looks like paying for link schemes, buying placements on irrelevant sites, or running digital PR campaigns with no connection to your target audience, search strategy, or no alignment with business goals.
Why off-page investment matters
User behavior has changed significantly and people are no longer searching on Google alone; they’re using AI search in tools like AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. These AI search tools work a little differently to traditional search engines. They rely on third-party opinions about your brand. It’s not enough for you to say you offer a service to a high standard; other credible websites need to confirm that this is true. AI-generated answers are full of citations and mentions pulled from third-party sources, not just what a brand says about itself.
Dig deeper: Brand mentions and how to make the most of them
How SEO budgets may vary by company type
SEO budgets vary significantly depending on business type and size, competition, and the complexity of what needs to be done. The budget ranges below should give you an idea of what your SEO budget might need to be to set you up for success.
| Business type | Typical monthly SEO budget | Budget rationale |
| Local business | $1,000–$3,000/month | Local SEO is generally a lower budget point than other types. However, multi-location businesses typically require higher budgets. Competitive industries such as legal, medical, and home services tend to sit at the upper end of the range. |
| Ecommerce | $1,500–$20,000+/month | Costs increase with catalog size and technical complexity. Small stores commonly spend $1,500–$4,000/month, while larger or highly competitive ecommerce brands can exceed $20,000/month. Budget allocation typically favors technical SEO, product data optimization, category pages, and buyer-guide content. |
| SaaS | $3,000–$20,000+/month | SaaS typically carries the highest investment due to the need for content production, authority building, and competitive acquisition strategies. Growth-stage B2B SaaS companies ($3M–$20M ARR) commonly spend $3,000–$20,000/month, while national or highly competitive programs often exceed $20,000/month. |
| B2B services | $2,500–$10,000/month | Budgets vary based on competition and expertise requirements. Investment is often weighted toward expert-led content, authority building, digital PR, and measurement due to longer sales cycles and more complex attribution. |
| Publisher / media | $5,000–$50,000+/month | Publishers typically operate at the highest end of SEO investment because content production is core to the business model. Significant budgets are allocated to content creation, large-scale technical SEO, and managing extensive content archives. |
How the SERP is changing budget allocation
Changes in search, like how people use search, changing algorithms, and how search engines or AI tools present information in SERPs, should influence decisions about how you allocate budget. For example, if a SERP has changed to lead with AI Overviews, then perhaps GEO tactics that increase AIO citations should be a focus.
But be careful not to assume that the presence of AI Overviews is an immediate reason to shift budgets to GEO tactics. Budget decisions need to be backed by data, not assumptions.
The reality of what’s happening in search could surprise you.
For example, a study by Semrush analyzed over 200,000 keywords, each with a search volume over 100, that either triggered or didn’t trigger an AI Overview between January 2025 and October 2025. They also tracked a set of keywords that didn’t trigger an AI Overview in May but did by October, allowing a direct before-and-after comparison for the same terms. When they compared keyword clicks before and after AIO appeared, clicks nudged up rather than down, yet we’re all hearing a lot about how AIO is taking clicks. The study also found that when AIO is present, so are a lot of other SERP features such as:
- Related searches
- People Also Ask
- Organic sitelinks
- And more
Related searches and People Also Ask appear alongside AIO almost every time.
The takeaway?
It might not be that AIO needs more budget and optimizations, or, potentially, at least not to the degree expected. Let’s say that one more time: AI might not be to blame. Maybe what actually needs the larger budget and better optimizations is the content that’s needed to get visibility in related searches. Or, perhaps, it’s internal linking that needs improving to have better organic site links. Or perhaps you have missing questions and answers and therefore your visibility in People Also Ask is poor.
It isn’t just Semrush’s data that suggests that AIO isn’t as responsible for click losses as the industry narrative would have you believe. Aleyda Solis had her own hypothesis: that text ads and SERP features were reducing clicks. She compiled data across four commercial verticals, and her hypothesis was proven correct. Text ads are the single biggest measurable driver of organic click loss, gaining between seven and 13 percentage points of click share in a single year.
What this means for SEO budget allocation
Before you allocate budget, you must do your research. AIO can be an easy scapegoat but you need to diagnose what’s actually happening in your vertical before you move a penny. How?
- Audit before you act. Pull performance data for your target keywords and identify where traffic is actually dropping. Is it organic rank, SERP feature displacement, or ad competition that’s eating your clicks?
- Match findings to solutions. Poor visibility in People Also Ask (PAA) points to a content gap. Weak sitelinks point to internal linking. High ad competition might mean PPC or bid strategies need a review, not your SEO budget.
- Benchmark your vertical specifically by looking at your site rankings or competitors. Don’t apply industry-wide panic to a problem that may not exist in your space.
- Allocate budget. Once you know what’s actually driving the decline, you can make a case for where budget should go, whether that’s content, technical SEO, paid, or, yes, if appropriate, GEO.
- Consider a dedicated AEO/GEO budget line item so GEO efforts are tracked separately against their own KPIs. This allows for dedicated impact reporting on GEO or AI search separately from SEO efforts.
Knowing what’s actually driving change in search gives you something more useful than guesswork or assumptions based on industry-wide narratives.
It’ll help to give you a framework to work forward from.
Although every SEO budget allocation is particular to that business and needs its own in-depth analysis and plan, there are some rules that will likely fit every business:
- Spend less on commodity content. There’s no need to create content just for the sake of it. Every piece of content needs to be justified within the wider strategy and created with purpose. For example, there’s no value in creating content for high-volume keywords if what you want is clicks. Keywords with a lot of search volume used to result in clicks, but now you don’t get anything other than visibility. If the visibility is right for your strategy, then go for it, but don’t create content for the sake of it.
- Spend more on experts and original research. What AI can’t generate is genuine expertise and proprietary data. First-person perspectives, original studies, and cited expert opinions will help with your SEO strategy while building trust for your brand. In most cases, this is where your content budget should be shifting.
- Spend more on brand visibility in the right places. Being mentioned, cited, and recommended across the web is how AI systems increasingly learn to trust and surface a brand. PR, digital earned media, and thought leadership all feed into AI visibility because of its third-party credibility. Plus, mentions in top publications boost brand perception too.
- Spend more on measurement. A changing SERP with AIO and other features means that tracking of new metrics like share of voice, AI citation monitoring, branded search volume, and traffic by intent type, is necessary. These metrics help stakeholders understand the current search landscape and give you the justification you need to secure budget for SEO or GEO efforts.
Allocation won’t look the same across every industry. For example, a SaaS business or a healthcare provider may need to weigh AI search budget less than a local service business or retailer would have to because citations and mentions in Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories, which both of those examples are part of, are more reliant on traditional SEO, according to BrightEdge. The right split depends on where your audience is searching and what the SERPs in your vertical actually show.
Warning signs your SEO budget is misallocated
Budget misallocation can be very difficult to spot, especially when SEO is going well. If clicks and visibility are increasing, then it’s easy to assume that the budget is fine, but it’s worth revisiting budgets regularly and auditing search and the current setup to see if the team can make improvements. For internal teams, consider speaking to an external consultant who can look at everything with a fresh set of eyes.
Here are some common budget misallocation warnings:
| Signs SEO budget is misallocated | What happens | What to do |
| You’re paying for tools nobody uses. | Tools often come with a subscription that renews at monthly or annual intervals. As search changes or team members come and go, tools become redundant or obsolete. Businesses can lose money on tools that are no longer used. | Audit subscriptions every quarter and ensure you’re only paying for tools you use. |
| There is no technical role attached to SEO. | If SEO teams don’t have reliable access to development time, issues can compound and create a huge technical debt that will become expensive and timely to address. | Developers must have some time allocated for SEO requests. |
| Nothing connects SEO to revenue and SEO teams report on rankings only. | For years, SEO was considered a top-of-funnel strategy for clicks and traffic, and with little to no impact on revenue, but SEO should be a revenue-driver. | SEO teams must track SEO’s influence on revenue and business goals, such as conversions, pipeline contribution, or assisted sales. |
| Publishing AI-generated content without expert oversight. | AI-generated content has its place in content production, but if content is mass produced, without edits, then it’s likely underperforming. | Create a content strategy based on audience needs, search rankings, and business goals. People search to solve problems and if you solve it within your content, there’s every chance you’ll be cited within AI for relevant searches. |
| You’re producing content nobody updates. | Content should be an asset to your business. If content is published, then forgotten about, it’s probably not worth creating. | Create content that you want to share with your audience. This is the type of content that generally has a role in strategy for years to come because it supports your audiences and their problems. When you do this, you create content worthy of an edit because you want to maintain your position as the most useful resource on the web for your audience. |
| You’re moving the budget to paid search to compensate for organic decline. | If you’re spending more on ads because organic traffic has dropped, then it might be time to revisit SEO strategy and budget misallocation. | Establish what actually drove the traffic drop and work to solve the problem, especially if the page converted organically. |
Finding your budget misallocation is overwhelming!
It requires a lot of analysis about where money is being spent and what the outcome is of that investment. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve made life a little easier for you.
We created a FREE SEO budget reallocation calculator.
All you need to do is download the document, fill in five short sections about how you split your SEO investment, and the sheet will do the rest, advising where your potential issues might be and where you can get budget from.
Download: SEO Budget Rallocation Calculator by Search Engine Land
How to justify your SEO budget to leadership
One challenge that SEO professionals face when it comes to SEO budget is justifying the spend to SEO stakeholders. The issue is that SEO professionals know they need budget, but explaining why they need it in a way that motivates stakeholders to loosen the purse strings is difficult.
It’s all about soft skills and the angle.
Here are some tips:
- Don’t lead with traffic metrics, lead with conversions and revenue. Clicks don’t look as impressive as they once did, but clicks never paid the bills anyway. When it comes to getting more budget, SEO teams must be able to prove, with data and reports, that SEO is making money.
- Track conversions that leadership finds valuable. There should be a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in place already, but if there isn’t, get one in place. KPIs will tell you what matters to the business. You can also listen to what leadership or stakeholders say in meetings to get a view of what’s important to them. Typical conversions that leadership cares about include demo requests, trials, purchases, booked calls, form fills. In other words: KPIs that are related to business and revenue growth.
- Report SEO’s assisted conversions. If SEO builds audiences through content that pay-per-click teams re-target and convert later, then SEO deserves its credit in making the sale happen. SEO isn’t always a standalone channel. Use multi-touch attribution to show SEO supporting sales.
- Benchmark competitors that leadership already cares about. If you can show that SEO efforts are closing the gap on competitors, you’re bound to get leadership engaged. Metrics like share of voice (SOV) tied to pipeline, coverage of revenue-driving intent, and presence in AI answers. Together, these build a clear picture of how SEO is moving the business forward.
- Lead with actions. Instead of simply telling stakeholders, “We need to invest in SEO,” tell them why with data and actionable steps. For example, “To achieve 30% revenue growth, we need to gain 2,500 new customers. Based on our current data, we expect needing an increase of [budget].”
Pro tip: Securing budget is as much about good relationships and trust as it is data and finances. Show you care about stakeholder’s thoughts and feelings. If you tune in during meetings, you can learn what motivates them. In your next meeting, try something like this: “In our last meeting, you mentioned [conversion] as a primary KPI. I looked into this and found that we’re already achieving X, but with a budget increase of Y, I think we could get….”
Ultimately, your goal is to do two things:
- Get attention by talking to leadership and stakeholders about the things that matter to them and excite them! Page one rankings probably won’t do it, but knocking a competitor off the top spot will. It’s the same story with a different angle.
- Justify the investment with the outcome. Marketing channels get investment when they’re paying that investment back and then some. Teams that make money, get money.
Building a defensible SEO budget
No matter how well you present your budget requests to leadership, there will always be pushback and challenges. You have to be able to defend your decisions.
Presenting a data-backed pitch for SEO investment is a good start, but you can also:
- Define business goals and tie every SEO initiative to pipeline or business growth and brand visibility.
- Identify growth constraints and how your investment will help you to resolve things like content bottleneck, technical debt, website or brand authority, or measurement and reporting.
- Allocate resources against constraints to show that you’re being proactive. Fund bottlenecks first to get work flowing. Just because a wheel might be squeaking, it doesn’t mean you have to oil — aka, fund it — first.
- Audit the tool stack quarterly to eliminate redundancy. You can use money saved to reinvest in strategy, execution, and content quality.
- Measure outcomes so your report is engaging leadership over the outcomes that matter. If your SEO report lacks a conversion metric and an assisted-revenue number, it is a visibility report, not a performance report
- Set timeline expectations about how long things will take based on experience and historical data if you can. For example, if AI citation gains typically take 60 to 90 days, and branded search lift takes one to four weeks, then compounding growth can be expected in four to six months.
See where your brand appears, where it doesn’t, and exactly how to win more visibility across search, AI, local, social, and every channel that matters.
SEO budget reallocation calculation
Now that you understand SEO budget and the importance of allocating it correctly, you need to figure out exactly what allocation looks like for you.
Your next step is to undertake an audit across the five pillars mentioned above: people, technology, content and authority, technical SEO, and off-page SEO or brand building. Once done, you can decide which pillar should have budget and how much. Remember to base your decisions on data and outcomes. Tell leadership why you need a certain tool, what problems it solves, and how much money it saves (or makes) the company.
To make things a little easier, try our free SEO budget reallocation calculator. The “SEO budget reallocation calculator” is a free Google Sheet that shows you where your SEO budget is misaligned in about two minutes. Answer three quick questions for each of the five investment areas, enter how your budget is split across them, and the sheet tells you which area is starving your results, which is over-funded, and where to move money. It won’t set your budget from scratch. It’s built to help you reallocate what you already spend and walk into your next budget conversation with a clear, defensible case.
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