Despite online marketing being the fastest growing area of marketing for the past couple of years, with talk of Google, SEO, PPC, and a whole host of other abbreviations becoming virtually commonplace, it seems that a number of companies are extremely cautious still when it comes to taking the leap of faith and investing in search engine optimisation.
Some of these companies, who haveve been badly burned by SEO ‘experts’ before, are justly mistrusting, having seen no results - not to mention return on investment - from previous ventures into the SEO world. To others, who have never participated in any form of online marketing before, it seems to be the unknown and mysteriousness surrounding search engine optimisation that is the stumbling block.
There’s no denying that when compared to traditional advertising, such as magazine and newspaper adverts which you can see in black and white and/or technicolour, SEO is relatively mysterious. Just because you can see a magazine advert, however, does this make it a wise allocation of marketing spend? Print advertising is by no means cheap, costing anywhere between £500 and £5000 per individual page. And can you really measure the return you get from it, if there is any at all?
The truth is, there’s no smoke and mirrors with SEO – no mysteries, no hocus pocus. SEO is simply the process of increasing the relevancy of your website for the keywords and phrases associated with your business and its products/services. And it’s hard work.
The cost of search engine optimisation, when compared with print advertising is comparatively humble. The beauty of SEO compared with traditional advertising is that because it’s all numbers – rankings in Google, number of visitors, percentage increase in sales - the proof in the SEO pudding is in the eating. And boy, does is taste good when it’s done right.
It may be that you never know to the nth degree what it is your SEO company do to your website on a month to month basis. But when they are delivering you the results – be it in measurable sales or an increase in enquiries – isn’t that what really matters?
Discussion
Leave a Reply