SEO Or Traditional Advertising - You Do The Maths

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 28 of September , 2008 at 10:04 pm

The majority of business owners who have a website prefer to use a more traditional form of advertising. For those with a local brick and mortar presence, it will be the traditional media such as print or radio. For those with only an online presence, it will be advertising in the form of banners or pay-per-click such as Googe Adwords. However, there are many more businesses that fail to use any form of promotion including basic search engine optimization.

The biggest barrier to employing an SEO expert is not cost. It is distrust. Cost then comes a close second. If you stop and think about it for a moment, how much money would you hand over for what is essentially a marketing campaign if your told the results may take a month or three too appear? It would take some convincing for most people, and it is understandable.

You can start to see results a lot earlier if you do incorporate a pay-per-click campaign, but of course that requires a larger budget to begin with.

What is important is that any search engine optimization campaign begins from very early in the businesses development. The older a business is the harder and more expensive it can cost. However, compare traditional offline marketing against search engine optimization and over time, SEO comes out well in front.

A newspaper or magazine ad can cost up to $2000 for a single day. Settle for a much smaller ad at $300/$400 and multiply by that by say 20 days you run the ad each month. That’s a tidy $6000. Believe me, you can run a good SEO campaign, a business blog and a PPC program for that sum, and probably have some lunch money left over as well.

It is all about simple math – the numbers tell the story. If you are current selling an item worth $100 each day, what would it be worth to sell 10, 20 or 50 or more? If you run on a margin of 20%, which is a small margin, being able to sell 50 per day would generate a profit of $1000 per day. Can you now afford to spend $200 per day to achieve that - you would still be left with $800 per day?

Sometimes, whilst the whole prospect looks daunting, and you may have to pay more than you receive initially, a good optimization campaign with some targeted PPC advertising can over time turn your business into a highly profitable enterprise. Unfortunately, whilst we can deliver the customers, it is your service and the product quality that will ensure your ongoing success.

Can you afford search engine optimization for your business? The question should be - Can you afford not to?

                      Category: SEO