New Orleans Internet Marketing

How much per month do you spend on SEO, not including on-page stuff like content and changes to your site? Is it enough? How much would you need to spend to be comfortable with the SEO effort?

I do SEO for a bunch of sites, some for other people, some for myself. I think I spend around $700 / mo. on link building for my own sites. Although I’m really not happy with that. I would like to spend $1000. If I spent $1k / mo. on link building I think I could totally dominate the keyword phrases I want. But I do have top rankings for like 7 out of 10 kw phrases I want (see the correlation there?) :)

Without going into details that would help my competition devour me (I think they probably spend twice as much for not nearly as great results), my budget breaks down to about an even split of several different forms of link building. Including the occasional email from yours truly to the more exceptional websites I want links from.

For my clients, I find I can hit moderately competitive keyword phrases for around $600 / mo., given about 6 months time if they were no where on the charts before I start. By “moderately competitive,” I mean the top results have some well optimized PR4 sites, maybe a PR5 or two. It seems like a PR5 is more difficult to attain these days than it was a year ago.

What do you guys spend on link building, and how competitive is your market?