Why Great SEO is Worth Every Penny
Budgets are tight, and if you are a small business owner you might be asking yourself if you can really afford to be doing SEO. Another good question might be how could you get by without it? In a general sense, everyone is doing SEO to some degree; the more time and money available to devote to it, the more that can be done in both the short and long term. So if you stopped doing SEO altogether or even slowed it significantly you are risking falling behind your competition. It might sound a little dramatic, but that isn’t far from the truth for most small to mid-sized businesses.
Why does SEO cost so much?
Many different factors influence costs for SEO providers.
Some of the top influencers are:
- Competition – Search is, by nature, a win or lose game. If you win, someone else has lost, and vice versa. Some brands have greater available resources to devote to SEO and thus can invest and then reinvest their profits to continue improving their rankings, while brands with less have to work harder and smarter to keep up.
- Landscape – Keywords are a big part of SEO and can have a lot to do with how much a campaign might cost. For example some keywords are localized and specific to a given place, while others are more general and can be applicable on a global scale. Money also plays a part in how well your brand does for a given keyword as different kinds of PPC advertisements such as Google AdWords can be targeted with higher budgets winning higher competition keywords.
- Reactive vs. Proactive – Good SEO plans for the future – long-term plans are going to be more costly than short-term solutions, but can also result in greater gains over time. Most strategies that focus on long-term goals also take steps to avoid search engine penalties which are going to involve more hands-on work and thus cost a bit more.
- Tracking & Analytics – Google (or any other search engine) does not give away its data on website performance… a good SEO has to track that information down and then distil it into something that can be used to further your strategy and hopefully increase your rankings and your profits. This kind of time investment isn’t cheap, and there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than seems to be happening. Lots of number-crunching, data analysis, and future projections go into a good SEO campaign from start to finish.
In essence, SEO is an investment because it is something that needs to be done constantly and consistently in order to show best results, and when done properly is worth every penny. Good SEO will pay for itself in the long run by increasing your brand’s visibility, optimizing your content, pages, and profiles, and making it easier for search engines to find and index your content.
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