What’s your long term website strategy? If it’s not SEO, think again…

Newspaper revenues are dying on the vine, the number of people buying newspapers is decreasing rapidly, TV advertising revenues continue to diminish; response rates on all traditional media are way down… How do you reach customers in a more cost efficient way? Smart businesses are realizing its way better to reach customers at the exact moment they’re looking for a specific service than to try to bombard them with messages when they’re not interested. It took a while for people to stop using the ‘classified ads’ and switch over the Craig’s List and CareerBuilder– just like people stopped using typewriters when word processors came out; but once people ‘got it’ they let go of the old way and never looked back.

The same holds true for SEO as it compares to pay per click advertising. Although pay-per-click spending is reaching all time highs, many business owners are bothered by the fact that more than 70% of all clicks are not coming from PPC from ads. Data from Enquisite suggests that the cost of SEO may be one-seventh the cost of PPC.

Does that mean you should not use pay-per-click advertising? No… there are many great uses for PPC and SEM, but the question is, do you have an SEO strategy that over time will reduce your need to pay for each and every click (as your competitors continue to bid up the cost of every keyword) and help you transition to a place where most of your clicks are coming from organic search (for free)?

Begin your organic strategy now… and reap the benefits later

You can set up a logical, affordable, organic growth strategy that can sensibly fit your budget; the key is to begin now. With a good, solid content strategy and link building campaign, this can be done over a number of months (depending on competition in industry you’re in) and will land you on the first page of the SERP’s for the terms you want to rank for. Do proper job of keyword targeting on the terms you can rank highly for, optimize your site with proper SEO tactics, including page titles, header tags and the like- (there’s a lot to do but it can be done) add content over time, use keyword-rich anchor text… and a good link building campaign, and after a while you’ll see your traffic go up, while your need for paid clicks goes down. It’s interesting to note, once you build your organic rankings, visitors will put more trust in your organic listing than your paid listing, and click on that instead.

If you’re a small to medium sized business, like a dentist or a house painter, where there are no giant companies willing to spend crazy money to take over the market, you can build rankings that will be hard to beat, and your competitors will spend their hard earned money on expensive keyword campaigns while you enjoy the benefits of organic rank…

It’s really not a question of, is it worth it; the question is… when will you begin?