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Our Insights / Media

SEO equals ROI: How Search Engine Optimization Could Save You $99,000

by TAYLOR PRATT, Search Marketing Specialist

search Whether you have a website, are redesigning your site or are starting from scratch, you've asked yourself, "How am I going to get people to my site?" In this short article I explain search engine optimization (SEO) and how it can bolster your search engine rankings to get more eyes on your Web content.

What is SEO?
SEO is the process of enhancing your site so that it attracts targeted, high-converting traffic via search engine listings — without having to pay the search engines every time someone clicks-through to your site. SEO is not pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, and you don't have to worry about a daily or monthly budget. When you're constantly optimizing your site for search engines, your pages naturally capture all possible traffic, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Before I discuss what goes into an SEO campaign, it is important to know a few things:
  • - SEO is a walking race. You can't enhance your site on Friday and expect to
    reap the benefits on Monday. With SEO, plan for the long term.
  • - Once you decide you want to redesign your site or build one from scratch,
    you should have an SEO specialist point out potential indexing issues.
    The way you build your site will influence the success of your SEO efforts.
  • - SEO requires constant tweaking. Because search engines constantly evolve,
    you should continue to build out your website and to stay current with
    the SEO news.

What are the basics of an SEO campaign?
Structural optimization allows a website to be indexed and crawled by search engines. Such enhancements can include reducing page load time, optimizing Flash and/or image pieces, improving URL structure and more.

Content optimization primarily involves finding the search terms or "keywords" people use to find your site or related sites and then seeding your site's content with these words. You should base your content, target links and even URL structure on these keywords. Content optimization also includes the similar enhancement of meta-tags, internal links and images so that they attract visitors.

External site optimization is the process of creating tables, calculators, widgets or other unique content that links to your site. Because links are like votes for your site's authority, the more related and trusted websites that link to your site, the better your site will rank in the search engines. The best way to attract links is to build useful tools and/or content on your website.

How long does it take to see results?
Results depend on how well and quickly you use the aforementioned tactics. Some organizations may see results as quickly as a couple of weeks. Companies that take longer to implement thorough site changes will see slower results. Regardless of how long it takes to see effects, plan on spending at least a year working on your campaign. If you continually work well on SEO, you won't slip in the search engine rankings.

SEO vs. pay-per-click marketing.
While it's true that SEO is a long-term commitment, it's the most cost-effective way to drive traffic to your site and it offers a great return on investment (ROI). The best way to justify the cost of SEO is to look at your PPC campaign (or potential PPC campaign).

Use your PPC information to estimate how much money you would be saving by ranking in the top position in the major search engines. Let's say the most important key term you plan to target is "hockey equipment." Using Google Adwords you can estimate that you would be paying, on average, $2.75 per click. Using a keyword estimator, you find that people search for this term 300,000 times a year. While you can't expect to get all of those clicks, you can anticipate that 1 percent of 300,000 will click through to your site (3,000 visitors total). That's a total cost of $8,250 a month ($99,000 a year) that you could save by ranking organically in Google. And that's just one keyword.

While SEO doesn't offer the instant results that PPC does, the ROI makes it a great investment. Plan your SEO campaign carefully, don't take any shortcuts and be patient. With enough hard work you'll be able to take your business to the next level.
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