Who should budget for SEO?

In a recent poll, I asked where should the SEO Budget should come from, and it seems my network (mostly marketers & SEOs).

A disclaimer: Companies come in all shapes, structures, organograms, and sizes. Not one size fits all. This is an exercise in positioning a channel into a set of responsibilities.

Let's break down the answers and discuss what would mean for SEO to be in one of those departments.

Search

Almost half of responders, being SEOs, and probably due to a naming convention see SEO have chosen Search as their department sponsor.

Due to the poll limitation, I could not break down Search into a standalone SEO department or the department where both Performance & SEO stay together.

In this case, I will assume that Search includes both Paid & Organic Search mainly by Google and some Social channels.

This is a performance based sponsor.

If SEO is under the Head of Search, then you are seeing SEO as a performance channel.

?? Measuring ROI and Direct impact to Revenue as main metrics.

Performance is often a well-funded channel, and a Head of Search will be splitting the budget into a percentage for each.

?? From my experience, 5% to 20% will got to SEO and the rest 80% - 95% will go to Paid.

?? This is a solid choice, as Performance & Organic Search can support each other.

?? The negative outlook is that SEO will be judged in short-term results and may not come with a longer-term outlook.

A strong leader, with good understanding of both will be able to balance the budget, expectations, and use both channels to grow the company.

Brand

SEO is more of a top of funnel channel. You can directly measure result and even contribution to Revenue, but the longer your sales cycle, the more difficult this becomes.

Many bigger companies or sales-driven corporate companies have difficulty placing SEO in a more performance-based environment.

Placing SEO under brand solves the performance tracking issue, as it's considered a brand awareness channel and is handled as such.

?? The goal of a Brand focused SEO channel is awareness and bringing relevant traffic to the business.

?? It allows for more flexibility, less strict requirements, and is less likely the budget will be cut. This is a longer-term outlook approach.

?? The downside is that not all businesses invest in brand. Many businesses have brand as a sub-department or under a creative director. In this case, SEO would be a bad fit.

?? Also, a brand department exists in bigger companies of a few hunded employees (at least), making it a non-existent choice for smaller companies.

Brand is a very reasonable department to sponsor SEO for larger companies. This is what I believe Andrew Holland suggests in his post here that inspired my original poll.

Content

The role of content is quite diverse. A content department may serve as a service-center to the rest of the company or has their own goals and targets.

When Content has their own goals, it's all centered about touch-points, distribution, and SEO is an integral part of bringing Revenue.

?? The goal of SEO in Content should be an integral distribution channel, and might also be the main goal of Content.

?? If content SEO is your main focus, then Content & SEO work well. SEOs can get direct access to content talent and use it to push great quality content to rank.

?? Unfortunately, content is as far away as the product & tech departments are. This creates a "weakness" in requesting technical fixes and need a good process of requesting work from devs to achieve technical improvements.

?? Another downside is the budget allowance. Content rarely gets the budget allowance of Performance or Brand, making it difficult to pitch essential projects like link-building.

Other - Product

An interesting approach by Axel Jack Metayer is that SEO should be connected with product. That's an unusual proposition (but not unheard of), and my takeaway is that it's more focused on the Tech side of SEO.

There are different pros & cons to this:

?? You can't turn it on/off, which makes budgeting easier and long-term.

?? You get more direct access to dev time, and probably opens the more technical and programmatic strategies of SEO that would be a challenge elsewhere.

?? You might have more ownership in the whole website as well.

?? You are a "client" for other departments like content & creative, making content SEO harder and require negotiation with the editors.

?? Less in touch with marketing and marketing goals.

Where do you think SEO budget needs to come from, and why?