Home 
To SEO or not to SEO, that’s the question?
OK Mr. Business Owner you have rolled up your sleeves and you are going to battle the SEO God’s and get ranked on first page all by yourself.
If you have paid attention, you are well aware that there are other ways to obtain traffic/visitors. For example, pay per click campaigns (PPC) like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or Microsoft adCenter.
Now here is what I say about this, and it’s not an opinion of mine at all, but a common fact: PPC will bring you quick results, but you will have to keep your bank account open like a running faucet, the minute you shut the faucet off your marketing also will shut off.
The investment can be rather large in the PPC world, and you can never be sure, whether PPC has paid for itself, or it’s just money down the drain.
Here Lies The Beauty Of SEO
SEO is very different, in terms of overall investment and overall impact. With SEO the business owner will first make an initial investment (and all of us SEOs know that real optimization costs are very small), and a few months later you will start seeing dividends by way of dramatic increases in your traffic and sales.
Yes, SEO pays for itself hundreds of times better, when used as a long term business strategy.
The amount of traffic that SEO will bring you is unlimited. You’d simply go bankrupt trying to get as many visitors with PPC campaigns.
Read One of my clients painful lessons:
In March 2009, they launched a new online ecommerce portal. As with most business owners looking to get a quick flux of visitors to their site, they started a PPC campaign and spent about $27,000 within 3 months. In return, it only brought $14,000.
After getting a bad taste in their mouth from PPC, I was hired and we started an SEO campaign. Too make a long story short, it cost less than $14,000 (including my charges). And, by April 2011, the estimated gain from SEO was roughly $60,000, which is almost 4 times more than what Pay Per Click could bring.
So as you can see, even if you hire an SEO expert to optimize your site and deliver high rankings for targeted keywords relevent to your business, the marketing investment will pay for itself many times over!
So this is just food for thought, marketing strategies are changing to be more online focused, and if your business is not on Page 1 – let’s just be honest, no one will know you exists (except your buddies!)
Stay Updated with our Monthly SEO Newsletters containing training, industry topics, and Specials.
You hit the nail on the head with this post! Organic SEO is extremely important. Most business owners today think that PPC campaigns will pay off big dividends because of the demographic information they spit out. WRONG! If you aren’t strategic and careful to mind your budget, you will lose your shirt. Hire an SEO expert yes, but also know what to ask when interviewing potential candidates. There are way too many so called “SEO guru’s” out there that think signing a business up for every directory listing they can find, especially those that are low cost and automated is the key to SEO. IT’S NOT! Understand good SEO practices before spending a fortune with someone who ISN’T a true SEO professional.
Thanks Sheryl for stopping by. I agree that the SEO space is full of people getting over on businesses. I am one that is looking to educate as well as help business reach there online marketing goals. Doing it the right way will take longer, but you will not have to worry about google changing algorithms over time, and will effectively see your search rankings have staying power by doing it the right way.
Pingback: Learn about the Top On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips | Chase Web Solutions Blog | Raleigh, NC
Sounds like to me the best way to go is the SEO service. Pay Per Click sounded good at the beginning but the revenue you get from it isn’t enough for the payoff. Do you think it is advisable to stick to a local SEO service or can you do a national and local SEO?
Well this depends on your business. If your client base is mostly local then your focus should be too optimize for local searches. If you are product/services are sold to anyone then I would recommend optimizing for keywords that those people would be searching on.
It looks like there really is no question about it, a local SEO service would be the best way to go. PPC is maybe a short term option but I wouldn’t invest a lot of time or money in it, because it doesn’t sound like it pays off. If I read it correctly the SEO service paid for itself in a matter of months and you were in for nothing but profit.
Yes SEO is a long term investment that will provide value long after the campaign is completed.
Yes I believe you should hire an SEO but I think it should be a local SEO service to draw in local business. I also agree with Sheryl regarding the so called SEO’s as well, you have to be very careful when you go to hire one because there are a lot of scams. I read about one the other day that was a pay for results campaign and if you didn’t get result you didn’t pay. They were discussing on a forum how that is really risky to do but it has paid off for them because they can get results. If you could find a reputable company that did that I think that would be the answer. Definitely don’t go Pay Per Click though unless you want to end up bankrupt, as someone else put it, it is like turning on a faucet in your wallet and leaving it on.
Thanks for the stopping by and contributing to the thread. I agree with you – one must have enough knowledge as a business owner so they are not scammed. I am hoping to bridge that gap with this blog.
I believe that you should have an SEO service in place that will keep your business web site up and running the way it is supposed to. A web site has to be ran like a business it’s self, it has to be updated every three days or so, it has to have research done on it to make sure you are getting the traffic you want and the ranking and so on and so forth. Any business owner knows they are to busy to do all that is required to make it a success, so yes a SEO service would be a requirement in my books.
PPC used to make sense before the big “G” cracked down on wrecked it for small business. If you’re gonna play that game you’ve got to have deep pockets and better be creating a list so you build your customer base otherwise it’s money down the drain.
SEO should be part of every marketing effort, but you need to have your traffic sources spread across multiple sources so if one runs dry your business doesn’t suffer.
I think that Sheryl put some good advice in her comment about understanding good SEO practices before you go out and hire someone and spend a fortune to find out they were not a professional SEO. This can not be a get rich quick scheme it takes time to do it right and I am really glad that you are out here to try and teach people that and teach them the right way to go about finding a good SEO. You have a great blog here with a lot of intelligent advice, it was also put together very well. Thank you for sharing your advice with us.
I can not agree with you more. The way I’ve always said it, PPC is an expense and SEO is an investment. But, just like with any investment, you need to invest wisely. So many folks are out there touting themselves as SEO experts and, since not too many people understand SEO, they buy into their pitch without enough knowledge. I suggest to poeple that they always get references and examples of sites that their potential SEO vendor have worked with and research the results for themselves – caveat emptor!
That said, with a bit of work up front, SEO is hands-down a better bang for the buck for the vast majority of businesses.
Well Stated! Definitely all businesses that have a website should be engaged in search optimization (SEO) on some recurring ongoing basis.
It’s a well known fact by those of us in the know, that any website without an active well planned ethical (and up-to-date) search engine optimization program in place is destined for failure. Unfortunately, non internet savvy business owners choose not to believe this reality. If your website has not been designed in a search engine friendly manner and/or has had no search optimization, then the odds are that the only people that will find your site are your staff, friends, colleagues and those clients who have your business card in hand.
The rest of the world, people who may be searching for your products and services online, will most likely not find your website. Hence many lost sales opportunities.
If your business has a limited advertising budget, you might consider diverting some of your existing offline advertising funds towards SEO; However it is important to recognize that SEO is a long term commitment, and it may take several months to reap the rewards of your efforts.
I think SEO is a helpful tool if you want your business to be known. There are a lot of types of SEO that you can do with your business. It’s all up to you which would you prefer to do for your business.
I agree with your article the web has become a vast money pit which can flow one way should you not be aware of the pitfalls, a good SEO expert is truely worth their weight in gold.
Personally I was against it at first but when I tried to do all the reports and comments and content writing and updates etc. etc. and found that I just couldn’t keep up with that and the rest of the business I started thinking that there might be something to this SEO service. Now don’t get me wrong I was still skeptical about all they were telling me they could do, I researched it, I interviewed companies everything I was supposed to do. I finally settled on one and they are amazing, everything they said they would do they have done and more. Please if you have a small business or large it doesn’t matter hire an SEO service and it will improve. Thank you for the opportunity to share my store.
First of all, in my opinion SEO is very important and defiantly should be part of your business strategy, especially if you run an online store that sole depends on traffic volume form the web. This is even more important for start up business as you are often trying to penetrate the markets and build authority as well as know what keywords to target and which ones to stay away from till later – and you need guide and help. Doing PPC only and hoping to get customers that way is bad on long term. Organic growth is where it’s at. Building authority and generating social buzz.
Second, doing your own SEO is not recommended because you often don’t have enough time, knowledge and resources to do it right. That’s why you should always approach SEO experts and get a few quotes with layout of what work they plan to do and how or in what stages. You gotta set your budget and you gotta understand that it’s an ongoing thing. It’s not something that you pay once and boom you’re on Google rank 1- no way! It’s gotta be done continuously as the new search phrases are surfacing every day and also the search engine algorithms changes over time, putting more or less emphasis on certain things.
In summary, you can make your money go further by hiring the expertise of SEO company and get higher ROI (return on investment) simply because they know what to do and how to do it. If you were to do it yourself, you’ll end up spending more time on it and less time on developing your actual business. Plus you may end up doing things with quick results or things you “think” are important only to in the end exhaust yourself and your budget. So be smart and hire an SEO company and meet with them regularly to go over your SEO strategy.
I used to think of pay per click campaigns as a way to jump start your web site traffic or a boost before your SEO organic results kick in over time. I really appreciate hearing about any cautionary tales like the one told here. The numbers behind this experience, has begun to increase my awareness about SEO budgets when you outsource it to an American company. I used to outsource it to a company in India and I paid only $200 per month. The achieved some good results, but mostly for search key words that were the lowest competitive phrases. It took some time to climb in ranking for popular key phrases. It felt like I was clawing and scratching my way just to jump a slot. I didn’t stick with it long enough to make a significant climb for those popular key words.
I think that SEO service is important to some companies but I also think if you are good at what you do you ought to be able to write about it and advertise it yourself as the business owner. I understand the time constraints but how hard can it be really? A good place to start I think is to get a hold of Google and see what you need to do. But I think any business owner should be able to do this by themselves. If you think it is necessary them they are always there for you, but give it a try.
SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.
1. It helps you to get more money
For publishers that use Affiliate programs or PPC campaigns, it was scientifically proven that traffic which comes from search engines is more likely to click on your Ads than other source of traffic.
2. It helps you build a community
As I said before, traffic that comes from SEO methods is sort of permanent because is the one that places users in the place that they want to be, your site.
3. Get more RSS Readers, Twitter Followers, Facebook fans for your website page
SEO articles are the ones that build credibility and trust so, as a sign of respect, the users will follow you on twitter, subscribe to your RSS feeds and of course they will know that on your website they will find the information they need and start gaining social media power.
I don’t think I have seen very many traditional service providers doing Search Engine Optimization to promote their business. I think the question posed in this article needs to be asked to plumbers, contractors, carpenters, cabinet and tile installers and even septic tank companies, to name just a few of the types of business I don’t think are very tech savvy. Maybe those who promote SEO services should contact these types of companies and offer them their services. They are the ones who need more consulting about promoting on the internet.
Yes Ann – local businesses in this day and age require a solid online presence. Without it they are really at a disadvantage.
Superior piece of writing. Continue to keep up the superb work.
Pingback: 8 Tips fo Optimzing your Google Places | SUCCESSFUL INTERNET TOOLS