How much should you invest in your website each month.

Got a website that’s doing nothing?

That’s probably because you are not investing enough in it each month, and how much you should invest simply boils down to the budget you have for it.

Here’s a tip – with websites, you don’t have to do everything right this minute; you can spread it all over time.

How much time do I spend on my business websites?

I thought this would be a good benchmark, as I look after around 10 websites for various brands and services at my main business, Toast.

As we generate all our new business leads through free organic SEO, there’s a lot that goes on under the hood to keep these sites delivering new business leads daily.

Short answer: about half my time.

Getting a website to generate business is most commonly down to consistency – if you do not work on your sites regularly, they slowly drop off in the search, and before you know it, you’re no longer ranking.

What does half my time get me?

10–20 qualified leads per week seeking quotes for the services we offer on Toast.

In 2025, the revenue that hit our bottom line solely from this SEO-generated new business was: a lot more than £200K but not as much as £500K.

If you add in the LTV of each client, it’s into the millions – all from having lots of content that ranks positions 1-3 for commercial intent keywords.

So what could be worth to your business?

This is the crux of the whole thing – outcome, not effort.

If you work really hard on your website but generate no results (leads), that’s just busy work getting you nowhere.

If a new client for your business is worth £1000 initially and then £6000 in LTV (lifetime value), then one client is worth £7000.

If it costs you £5000 to get the first one, but then the others cost you £500 a pop. it’s like buying £20 pound notes for a Fiver – you would by as many as you could – you’d probably even borrow money to buy them… so why don’t you look at your website like this?

If your website generated 10 new leads a week, with a sales conversion rate of, say, 30% (oh yes, you have to be good at that too), that’s £12K per month off the bat and £72,000 in LTV per month.

Over the space of 12 months, it looks like this:

• £144,000 in new business in year one
• £864,000 on LTV secured (probably) in year one

B2B business providers are best placed to capitalise on this approach – if you sell low-ticket items, it can still work, but the traffic requirement gets tougher.

What you want is to offer Service X and rank in the top three for that search on Google.

How to make your website work harder: work harder on it.

For many small businesses that I work with, managing the website is not a role within the business; it’s an appendage to something someone is already doing.

This often falls to the business owner for micro companies or to a marketing lead for not-so-micro businesses.

Many clients simply don’t have time or other reasons for not working on their websites.

Fingers burned or just not sure?

Too many people I work with paid so-called experts to get the job done – usually for peanuts, so the result is that of a monkey – a shit site that sits there and just looks pretty.

Other people don’t believe that ‘their business wins new leads online’ – which often translates into ‘we don’t know how to do it‘.

Two ways.

1. Learn how to do it (takes time, lots of errors along the way, etc)
2. Pay an expert to do it (costs money, includes risk, unclear chance of success, etc)

That’s it – or you can employ the talent, but to be honest, that’s even more risky than the above.

Don’t focus on improving your website; instead, focus on improving your offer.

As a business owner, this is where your time is best spent – as the better tour service or product, the more people are going to rave about it when they actually get it.

Outsource the expertise to, well, experts.

Get someone to work with you, for an affordable monthly fee, for an agreed amount of work and then use that work done to generate and measure ROI.

80% of effective SEO is just doing it (properly) in the first place – by using an expert, you ensure it gets done: consistently.

SEO has many moving parts, and these are not just your website.

On top of actually doing the work, SEO and website marketing is a fluid landscape, and one that’s got far less viscous with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence.

Many clients look at their websites in isolation – we rank X for Y and so on, but SEO and website marketing is an ever-changing landscape because your competitors are asl working on their websites and other shit is always going on.

Here’s what can change in any given minute:

1. Google updates something
2. Historically great rankings tank
3. Your competitors update their content
4. You lose a backlink you’ve had for years
5. A brand-new site suddenly lands at #1
6. Your product or service is replaced by AI
7. Regulation changes that affect your site
8. You add a page to your site that tanks your entire site (it happens)
9. And so on…

There are many, many things you need to keep on top of when you are marketing online, and the above don’t even take into account keeping WordPress and plugins up to date or checking your site speed. sote size and so on.