Why Good SEO is Expensive
Don’t let all the click bait posts and Tik Tok videos doing rounds on social media fool you. The “OG” digital marketing channel, SEO, is very much alive and kicking!
In fact, the global SEO services industry is worth a whopping $80 billion in 2019! This is significantly higher than the $65 billion businesses were spending just a few years back in 2016.
Clearly, SEO continues to offer immense value to online businesses and its showing no signs of slowing down. With so many businesses pouring in millions into SEO, it is getting super competitive to outrank your competition yet, SEO still maintains one of the best conversion rates for online traffic, standing at 2.08%, just behind email marketing and referrals.
What makes the first page of Google prime real estate? User intent! The fact that SEO allows you to be there when users are proactively looking for products, services and solutions that you have to offer is what makes it truly invaluable. Marketers know it’s much easier to convert users that are further down the marketing funnel and that is what makes the first page such a coveted spot.
After all, the first page of search results is responsible for driving 90% of search traffic clicks. Imagine the volume of sales you’re missing out on by not acquiring those high intent users!
SEO is less about outsmarting the Google algorithm and more about understanding what your competitors are doing and what it would take to outrank them. Your SEO team is essentially doing a deep dive into your industry to determine the most valuable keywords for your business and then figuring out how the hell your competitors are ranking for those keywords. Armed with this knowledge, your SEO team will first spruce up your website to be search engine friendly by creating keyword rich content, mapping the right keywords to the right pages, ensuring good page speed, clean coding practices and optimizing various other technical elements of your site. Then begins the process of building high quality relevant backlinks from a wide range of sources from around the web. Again, your SEO team will be studying your competitor’s backlink profile and determining effective SEO strategies to pursue for building links to your website and do so in an ethical and tactful manner.
This is not PPC! It’s SEO!
Unless you’re looking for surface level on-page optimization, you’ll most likely be signing a six to twelve month contract with your SEO agency. There is no overnight success with SEO. Any service provider offering “quick results” is either using black hat techniques that can get your website penalized or are down right lying.
Improving your search engine rankings takes a lot of time and consistent effort. Not only is it extremely hard to build quality back links, you have to be careful that you’re going about it in a natural way so as to avoid the risk of being penalized.
The Google algorithm looks at more than 200 factors when ranking websites and even if you’re killing it with link building, Google will take its own sweet time to factor in these changes and reflect results. The fact that SEO has such a long turnaround time makes it all the more important for businesses to ensure they’re working with the right service provider.
It takes a stellar cross functional team to deliver effective SEO services. While there are many brilliant individuals that offer great SEO consultancy, when it comes to the actual execution, there’s no way that’s happening without a kick ass team with diverse expertise. Furthermore, you need this entire team to have the right mindset and an actual appreciation of SEO. This is far less common than you would imagine. Even though SEO has been around longer than social media and other new online marketing channels, finding agencies that truly understand this space is extremely difficult.
There’s good reason for this too. SEO is a complex and “behind the scenes” approach. Any team working on an SEO project, without a proper understanding of how long it takes to create an impact will quickly lose interest and motivation as they see no results.
Your account manager, SEO consultant, content creators, designers, developers, link builders — everyone needs to be great at what they do and have a genuine interest and understanding of search engine optimization.
In my personal experience, I’ve witnessed first hand how challenging it is to get organization wide buy-in for SEO even as an in-house resource. In 2010, I was heading SEO for one of the largest English language news website in Pakistan that had the foresight to hire an SEO specialist but didn’t really know what it entails. With archives dating back to the 1950’s, and tonnes of new content being produced everyday, the SEO opportunities were limitless! However, most of my time was spent getting organizational level on-boarding from setting SEO standards for editorial to fighting the case for a re-design and development, changing the backend technology and trying to explain why certain things must be done a certain way. While I was able to usher in the paradigm shift, it wasn’t easy and eventually I got frustrated and moved to another organization that actually got SEO (or so I thought!).
Point being, you need a kick ass team that gets SEO and this is a very rare find.
Here’s the thing that makes SEO invaluable for businesses — the effects of SEO compound over time. Say you’ve been doing SEO for over a year. Every single back link you’ve earned in this time matters. As the total number of back links to your website grows, the chances of you ranking for other, newer or more competitive keywords also increase.
While its true that SEO does take time to kick in, but when things get going, it becomes easier to build on your rankings and attract more targeted traffic through search. Compare this with social media, which is important in its own right, but that content calendar you spent so much time and money creating last year, has no value this year.
It gets easier to build on your rankings as your SEO gains momentum.
Once you’ve crossed a certain threshold with Google algorithms, you become a high authority website. Your rankings continue to improve as long as you maintain that positive momentum and continue to acquire more and more targeted users through search. Unless you screw up big time, its unlikely for your website to lose the authority it has gained with good SEO. Of course, there are times when changes in the Google algorithm can negatively impact your rankings. In other instances, a competitor might come along and knock you off from the most coveted search engine result spots. Hopefully, by that time, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get back on top and continue reaping the rewards of good SEO!
Getting Deeper into SEO
- Get the right MACRO understanding of SEO
- A Simple Guide to SEO — Neil Patel
- The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2019 — Hubspot
- SEO: What you need to know in 2019 — Search Engine Journal
2. Find the right keywords for your business
3. Check your on-page SEO!
4. Uncover link building opportunities!
