Search engine optimisation isn’t seen as the cheapest of business endeavours.
This unfortunately can turn some people off the idea. It’s wise for new business owners to be vigilant when it comes to their cash reserves, and anything that promises a long-term return on a fairly hefty initial investment is something that often sends alarm bells ringing in the heads of entrepreneurs.
Of course, we should know by now that SEO can indeed be extremely effective. It’s not just some scam that has managed to fool entrepreneurs around the world for the past couple of decades.
So it should be fairly clear that it’s all about how you go about SEO, as opposed to whether you do it or not, that can affect your business profits in a big way.
When we talk about making profits for a business, we should think about the terms and concepts that relate to both those profits and SEO.
We need to take into account return on investment, future-proofing, direct sales, digital marketing, and guest-to-customer conversion. If you do it correctly, then SEO can help you exceed in all of these areas.
Again, it’s worth highlighting the fact that increased profit from an SEO campaign isn’t something that manifests itself quickly; many won’t see the greatest benefits until after 8-12 months or so.
However, this can depend on how targeted you are in your approach. If you run a brick-and-mortar store, then you may have the advantage here, as long as you use the right technique.
SEO might start to see big returns for you much faster, but you need to ensure that SEO is locally targeted. Resources such as Smart Local can help you achieve this.
Spreading your net too wide won’t only cost you more, but it will also waste a lot of opportunity.
Those who are looking towards digital marketing to get some more short-term profit may not get everything they want from SEO.
But this is why no digital marketing expert would tell you to only stick with one marketing channel! Not all businesses can benefit from local SEO; the best equivalent they’ll have is in running advertisements on other websites (Google, YouTube, blogs) and mediums (TV and radio).
But in terms of profit, SEO can turn out to be more effective. The reason for this is that the ongoing investment that you have to make in SEO is very low once it’s actually helped achieve its aim, i.e. getting you into the top results on Google.
Which isn’t to say that SEO ceases to be necessary once this has been achieved. SEO will help keep you up there, and will also help optimise your website so as to increase the quality of the traffic you’re receiving.
It’s not enough to get thousands of hits per day, although this can bring in some extra money if you’re running ads on your website that are then followed. These guests need to convert into customers.
While some would say that SEO ceases to be useful here and that you need to switch your focus to CRO – conversion rate optimisation – the fact is that good CRO relies on good SEO.
Play your cards right and SEO can give your business profits a healthy boost.
