The ROI of SEO

Almost every other day I am asked, “Do I have to invest in SEO?” The not so smart ones tell me, “I don’t need SEO”.

Here is the truth. Getting professional SEO is the best investment you will make to get the maximum ROI from your web presence. In fact it costs more to drive traffic to your site than to establish a web presence. Seriously!

Investing in growing your business is always a good idea. At Cyber Gear, we never hired a single salesperson in 23 years! We invested in SEO and digital marketing. Maybe, the number one reason why we are growing exponentially. Talk about walking the talk!

For the non-tech savvy people (do they even exist?) SEO, or search engine optimization, is an approach to marketing that helps your business show up at the top of search engine results pages when potential customers are looking for you online.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Google is the single largest traffic driver to websites. Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day. That’s the average figure of how many people use Google a day, which translates into at least 2 trillion searches per year, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.

Bottomline. Google accounts for 57.8% of total referral traffic for the average site (10x the traffic that Facebook drives to the average site).

Here is the no brainer – if you’re going to invest in one online marketing activity, you should invest in SEO.

For those on the fence, consider these facts:

• 72% of online marketers describe content marketing as their most effective SEO tactic.

• 81% of people do some type of online research before making a large purchase.

• 47% of consumers read 3 to 5 pieces of content created by a company before talking to a salesman from that company.

• Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (ex. cold-calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate.

• 78% of location-centric mobile searches result in an offline purchase.

To calculate the ROI on SEO, it is worth noting that ranking 1st in organic search results for an important search query will drive x number of qualified visitors to your website every month. Based on a 5-10% conversion rate, it will more than pay for itself. While it’s easier and more accurate to track conversions for e-commerce, it certainly is possible for lead-based businesses.

Based on our 23 years of experience in digital business, I can safely vouch that investing in SEO in the long term leads to exponential growth (and much more affordable customer acquisition).

Finally, a note of caution, there is no magic bullet to activate the magic of SEO. It is a long and painstaking process – SEO often takes 3-6 months to gain traction. Use Google Analytics to measure the ROI of your SEO campaigns.