What is SEO Worth?

Some small business owners gasp when they are quoted a price for SEO, even when it is a relatively low one. I can understand gasping when you really don’t have it - I mean, I’ve been there too. But to begrudge it when you CAN afford it just isn’t wise. Those who complain of the price for low end SEO are not grasping the financial picture.

• Without good SEO, a site will fail to gain traffic unless that traffic is paid for, visitor by visitor.
• The site may grow to about 200 visitors per month, then stop. That isn’t generally enough to get buyers.
• The site may bring lots of traffic, but no one may buy - because good SEO also helps get buyers, not browsers.

Usually the effects of SEO are cummulative. That means that they’ll build, month by month. So your investment (and it is an investment) yields increasing returns each month for many months.

So let’s do a little elemental math…

You want your website to earn HOW much this year?

• $200? Who am I kidding, right?
• $2000? Well, it’s something, but not enough to justify the effort…
• $20,000? That’s sounding a little more reasonable…
• More? Sure! Bring it on!

Do you really think you are going to earn more without putting something IN? Usually SEO accounts for 25-50% of the startup costs of a website, if we are talking about a low end website. It should return more than it costs, within about a year.

Our rule of thumb for our clients is that if we cannot project, with a fair degree of certainty, that a business will get at least a 200% ROI from SEO expenditures, that we won’t recommend it. But we generally expect to see far better than that. Done right, good SEO will give you more like a 10 times Return on Investment, often more.

So why would you feel unwilling to spend several hundred dollars on the basics? The simplest equation is to be willing to spend about one quarter of what you expect to earn (that is profit, not gross), on good SEM (the whole search engine equation including site optimization), the first year. In later years, that may drop some, but it won’t ever stop, because SEO does change over time, and it will need to be adjusted at least once a year, more frequently if you are in a highly competitive niche, or if you want aggressive growth.

The real trick is to get the right professional - one who can give you something that will bring a return, even if you have a low budget, and that will give you a higher return if you have a higher budget.

SEO doesn’t just pay for itself. When it is done wisely, it provides a higher ROI than almost any other marketing method, up to a point. After that point, the ROI declines. So get a pro that understands the most important things to do - the ones that bring the highest results. And then do what they tell you to do for follow up marketing.

Nothing else will give you as much, for as little.