A successful SEO strategy can bring in an abundance of rewards for your brand. If you’re in the process of expanding and targeting new markets, SEO should be a vital part of your marketing strategy. It is important to know how to invest in it and how to apply it to your business’s website. SEO is the primary source of the traffic to most websites. It helps build your credibility and gives you a clear understanding of what your customers are searching for. Effective SEO should turn traffic to more qualified leads, increased engagement, and more conversions.

What is a Typical ROI for SEO?

There are several different metrics you can use to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO for your website and ad campaigns. You can measure using these items:

• Organic search – your page’s ranking in Google or other search engines.
• Organic traffic – your share of non-paid search engine traffic.
• Business metrics like backlinks, impressions, or clickthrough rate, among others.
• Business profitability – conversions into sales (though you may also find value in opportunities and/or qualified leads).

How Much Should You Invest In SEO?

Depending on where you’re starting from and where you want to go to meet your goals, there’s a huge amount of variance in terms of price. You should budget for a minimum of six months to see results. Beware of the many SEO scammers with “Guaranteed First Page Results!™” only to fall victim to a bunch of black hat tactics that end up getting you penalized and effectively erasing your site’s visibility. If you don’t have a massive SEO budget, that is okay! You can still focus on these important factors:

• Site architecture: Ensure good crawlability with Google Crawl, follow webmaster guidelines, and pay attention to user experience.
• Good content: Regularly add fresh, keyword-rich content that matches search queries and satisfies user intent.
• Quality backlinks: Natural backlinks (not link farms) from high trust-high authority sites can help you shoot up the rankings.

How Do You Invest In SEO?

Are you looking to expand your sales funnel? Increase customer awareness? Show up in a specific number of searches per day? Figuring out your what your goals are with the service will help prevent wasted money, time, and energy. Using SEO tactics will help you meet small goals while a comprehensive SEO strategy will help with more robust goals. There are several paid SEO tools that are well worth the money and can help you with keyword research to evaluating backlinks. These programs can provide you with clearer insights into your campaigns and help you boost overall SEO efficiency.

Should You Invest in SEO or PPC Ads?

SEO has a better average ROI than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, however, both are valuable. Ideally, you should have a mix of paid and organic search campaigns that make sense for your company and your current assets.

Advantages Of SEO: 

• Website traffic: SEO can help increase the total number of people who visit your site & land more clicks overall.
• ROI: More cost-effective than PPC, though be warned: Neither is cheap or easy.
• Branding and awareness: Organic search put your business in front of potential customers based on search queries, increasing visibility around search terms, & exposing people to your brand.
• Credibility: Ranking highly in SERPs can play a large role in building trust. Many users skip right past the paid ads & click on organic results instead.
• Longer-lasting results: While SEO takes some time to begin seeing results, it also takes longer to drop off. An optimized site can maintain a high ranking long after a PPC campaign has been deactivated.
• Stability: Similarly, whereas PPC ad positioning can change according to bids from the competition, a site with good SEO will hold a relative position even if you forget about it for a while.

Advantages Of PPC: 

• Faster results: Once you launch a paid campaign, you should begin seeing more traffic, clicks, and conversions right away.
• Algorithm changes don’t affect positioning: PPC is bidding for the top spots on a SERP, which means you don’t have to rethink content and strategies every time Google updates its search algorithm.
• More control: Because you have control over your spending, you’ll always know what kind of returns you are getting, which in turn makes budgeting easier.
• More accurate targeting: Paid search ads let you target based on an entire range of factors including demographics, geography, and time of day, so you can more accurately go after an audience.
• You can use visual ads: People are more likely to click on images of the product they’re searching for. You can do this with PPC, but not with organic search.

Your SEO Investment

Spending your budget with an SEO campaign is worth it when you focus on website architecture and content. Evaluate your site to ensure its well-built. Check to see is your website has crawlability and structural issues. Create good user experiences, make sure it loads quickly, and doesn’t have 404 links. You want to ensure your website has the information your targets are searching for. Effective and meaningful content will drive the traffic you want and improve your overall ROI. If you don’t know your way around code or having trouble with developing a content marketing strategy, you should be able to hire a professional agency to handle this for you. 

Read to invest in successful SEO services? Call 248.528.3600.