Reasons why you should invest in SEO, and how it can enhance your visibility, attract more organic traffic, and grow your business in the long term.
Ieva Treiliha
Business owners are often sceptical about search engine optimisation (SEO) when it comes to allocating the marketing budget.
They ask, “Is SEO even worth it?” – and I fully understand why this question is raised.
SEO is a matter of trust. SEO takes time. SEO is a long-term investment. The timeline for when you can see results from your SEO investment is relatively long, which is why it can be difficult for business owners to see the value of investing in SEO.
I am often asked whether SEO is worth it. The question of whether you should allocate a significant part of your marketing budget to SEO has many facets. But it is something I will try to answer as thoroughly as possible in the following sections. Stay with me – and see if SEO is an investment your business should consider in the near future.
Unlike paid advertising, it is not as easy to demonstrate the results achieved with SEO, and it is even more complicated to illustrate the results you can expect after a certain period of time. With SEO, there are no specific dashboards comparing daily spend with sales revenue from conversions. Therefore, it can sometimes be easy to conclude that investing in SEO is too expensive.
Firstly, it is important to understand what an “SEO investment” looks like from A to Z. An investment of £2,000 per month in SEO is typically seen as an investment in an SEO agency or SEO consultant. But it is much more than this. SEO involves working on all aspects of your website to make it more appealing to search engines and, of course, your customers.
This includes work on landing pages and content, structuring your content, improving the technical performance of your website, and much more. The results from SEO depend on the products or services you offer, what you want to be found for and where, how your website looks, how user-friendly and fast your site is, how much content you have, and a wide range of other factors.
SEO therefore relies on many different resources and outputs.
You cannot simply compare SEO investments with paid advertising. For this reason, it can be difficult to measure ROI (Return On Investment) from SEO – it requires looking at the full picture. When it comes to SEO, the timeline for investment and return is significantly different from that of paid advertising.
This does not mean that SEO is a bad investment – quite the opposite. However, it is important to realise how much work actually goes into SEO. SEO is expensive, but it is expensive because it involves many different tasks which, in synergy with each other, create lasting results.
SEO is costly – but at the same time, it helps generate significant revenue.
How do you succeed with paid advertising? Simply explained – the more you invest in paid channels, the easier it is to achieve results. The more you are willing to pay per click on competitive keywords, the more visible you become. This is not to undervalue the amount of work involved in Google Ads or paid advertising on social media. Paid advertising also includes analysis, ad creation, campaign management, bid adjustments, creative production, product feeds, and much more. However, with SEO, you are unlikely to become much more visible just by investing more money.
So how do you succeed with SEO? You need to activate even more processes and resources to succeed with SEO. This applies both internally and externally. To better understand the actual costs related to investing in SEO, it is important to understand what is required to succeed and get results with SEO.
One of the reasons companies deprioritise SEO is typically because they believe they lack the internal resources to handle SEO work. It is not necessarily a conscious decision to deprioritise SEO, but often a conscious choice to prioritise other tasks and disciplines.
Paid advertising is often outsourced and managed externally, whereas many companies prefer to insource SEO. Many larger companies can often justify having a dedicated product team for SEO work, but most small and medium-sized businesses cannot. Therefore, outsourcing SEO work may be the right decision for many.
Outsourcing SEO has its advantages. You free up internal resources to handle other tasks. You save on the resources needed to hire and train in-house SEO specialists. By outsourcing SEO, you gain access to dedicated specialist teams with expert knowledge and experience across a wide variety of clients, enabling them to tackle a broad range of challenges that may arise in SEO work.
Insourcing SEO also has its advantages. For example, you are not limited by a set number of hours dedicated to SEO each month. This also means you can achieve your content plans and on-page website optimisation much faster. In-house SEO specialists will usually have a better understanding of your products and your business.
Many small and medium-sized businesses opt for a middle ground – a marketing employee who helps with SEO tasks, combined with an agreement with an external SEO agency or consultant. This way, the internal marketing employee is guided and activated by experienced SEO specialists.
SEO consists of three key disciplines, meaning a good SEO specialist must be able to handle tasks within all three areas. Targeted and focused work across all three disciplines is crucial for your SEO success.
The ability to work across all three SEO disciplines is an important factor to consider if you are undecided between insourcing and outsourcing SEO. It can be difficult to find someone who excels in all three areas. At an SEO agency, you will typically find specialists with different skills, ensuring you are well covered across all SEO disciplines.
As mentioned, paid advertising requires data analysis, strategy development, ad setup, and creative development for the ads. Yes, the largest expense is spend on the various paid channels, but you should not underestimate the other work that contributes to success on Google Ads and social media.
SEO does not have the same media spend, but at the start, the SEO budget is used for developing a strategy and conducting keyword and market analysis, after which the monthly SEO budget is spent on ongoing on-page, off-page, and technical optimisation, account monitoring, and communication.
Strategy development and analysis may not use much of the budget, but executing the various on-page, off-page, and technical optimisations requires significant resources, either in terms of staff hours or the cost of outsourcing these tasks.
These tasks can range from copywriting, link building, outreach, and analysis to working with structured data, speed optimisation, or updating title tags and meta descriptions across the site.
Working with SEO can be a difficult, expensive and slow process, as you need to address many different disciplines simultaneously. This is especially true for businesses not used to producing content, setting up landing pages, structuring their website, or conducting outreach for link building.
It can be difficult to calculate the revenue from SEO, which also makes it hard to determine the exact costs associated with SEO. There is often collaboration between internal and external teams, making it challenging to pinpoint the true cost of SEO work.
Many agencies manage to present an oversimplified view of costs – but the scale is much larger than this. There are constant incremental conversions taking place. All in all, SEO delivers a strong ROI! It is all about seeing the full picture.
What output can you expect from SEO?
Simply put, it is better positions on Google, giving you more visibility, generating more organic traffic to your site, and ultimately higher organic revenue.
These are the two main KPIs we use to measure SEO success.
There are also some smaller, so-called “soft” KPIs you can use to measure your SEO success:
All these KPIs help measure the impact and output of SEO.
SEO not only has a positive effect on organic traffic and keyword rankings. With search engine optimisation, you improve the overall site experience for your customers. You become more visible to potential customers with optimised landing pages, and your conversion rate will also be higher on a fast and user-friendly website.
In this way, SEO also has a positive effect on other marketing channels. With search engine optimised landing pages, you can achieve a higher Ad Rank on Google Ads and better click prices. You can read more in these articles: How to get lower click prices in Google Ads and 6 things you should know about Google Ads.
For paid social advertising, you can also improve conversion rates by directing potential customers to optimised landing pages.
SEO work never really ends. There will always be new, potentially valuable keywords to optimise for, content to develop, and technical improvements to implement on your website. To scale SEO effectively, it is important to focus on these four factors:
You need a clear idea of your goals with SEO. Do you want more traffic to your site? Do you want to increase organic sales? Do you want to be more visible to potential customers? If you have specific keywords you want to rank for – which ones and how many?
You need a concrete idea of what you want to achieve from your SEO investment, so you can create an effective strategy and align expectations with your team or SEO agency. When your SEO team has a clear understanding of your goals, they can plan a step-by-step strategy on how to achieve them.
SEO can be an expensive investment that takes time to bear fruit. Building authority in the search engines takes time and will not happen overnight. To succeed with SEO, it is important to stay focused and not give up, even if the results do not come as quickly as you had hoped. With SEO, you must trust the process.
Targeted and focused work across the different SEO disciplines, and adapting your SEO strategy to the latest Google requirements and updates, will deliver visible SEO results and support your efforts to scale.
When working with SEO, it is important to focus on the low-hanging fruit where you can achieve results quickly. Once you have addressed these, it becomes easier to scale your SEO and achieve greater goals.
Outsourcing specific tasks is also important for scaling SEO. Outsourcing time-consuming or complex tasks can save you time and resources in-house. Typically, copywriting, translation, and developer tasks are outsourced, but if you have strong relationships and trust with your suppliers, you can outsource a range of tasks as needed.
Investing in SEO is comparable to buying a house rather than renting a flat. It may be more expensive, but the results do not only last while you are making the effort. The results of your SEO investment are often significant and long-lasting; the impact accumulates over time and delivers better and better results the more you optimise your website.
With an investment in SEO, you are not only investing in better keyword rankings and therefore more site traffic. You are investing in a general improvement of your website and your users’ experience. When you invest in SEO, you are making it possible for your customers to find you for the products or services you most want to sell. By investing in SEO, you ensure your customers can find information about your products and services on your landing pages. And by investing in SEO, you are one step closer to ensuring that your website meets Google’s requirements for content, speed and user-friendliness.
Yes, the costs related to SEO may be higher than those for Google Ads or social media, but with SEO you are working across many different aspects of your website.
The SEO value you achieve will not disappear overnight, unlike if you simply switch off paid advertising. It takes time to build expertise, authority and credibility with SEO, but it also takes time to lose them again if you pause your SEO efforts.
Although SEO is a more expensive and longer-term investment, it is absolutely worth investing in SEO. Contact us here to get started with SEO today!
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