We talk a lot about how great SEO is and how everyone how runs an online business should be doing some form of SEO. But to the uninitiated, it may seem like a waste of money or way too much money to justify.
It’s not a lot of money though. Just think about how much you might pay for advertising versus the cost of an SEO. You can spend any amount on SEO – from $30 a year to thousands of dollars a month. (Yeah, the big websites spend a TON of money on search engine optimization.) Let’s say you spring for a good SEO at a fairly mid-range price: $200 bucks a month.
$200 a month for a SEO expert might shock you, but let’s think about it. $200 a month multiplied by 12 is $2,400. $2.5 thousand a year is chump change is if you consider what you’re getting for that.
Of course, you don’t necessarily want the cheapest SEO expert.
Depending on the cost per acquisition (CPA) of a lead, you might be getting hundreds, perhaps thousands of new leads over that years time. And that’s just for the first year.
Meanwhile you could spend that $2,400 on one television ad that runs for a short time. You also have no means of knowing just how many leads you’re generating with it. Same goes for print – you may never know the return on investment of a “real world” ad campaign.
But SEO has ongoing value, is relatively cheap, is something that can directly affect your business. Not to mention you can see the results in your site’s analytics tracking tool.
On top of that, if you’re not doing SEO. as time goes on more of your competition WILL be. You’ll be left in the dust as more and more businesses learn about the value of SEO.
Odds are, Google will place more value on sites that did SEO longer ago. It’s happened before, where sites are sort of “Grandfathered in” – that is, as changes to the search algorithms change, the older sites still rank well, while sites that try to game the system using the older methods get whacked down a few notches (or pages).
You don’t need other forms of traffic generation – your improvement in the organic search results may be all you need. Of course you can improve on that by doing pay-per-click advertising, but SEO should remain your steady constant, the backbone of your online business and online marketing strategy.
SEO is relatively cheap, especially when you consider what you’re getting for it.
