I was speaking with a colleague of mine going through several of our clients PPC/MEDIA/SEO campaigns, and came to a conclusion that we feel needs to be spread around like gospel. A business simply cannot afford not to do SEO. A company’s rankings, or lack thereof, is a clear indication as to whether they will be successful or not.

Getting first page rankings is not a guarantee that you will be successful. However, not having rankings is a pretty good sign that you won’t be sticking around for very long. I see this over and over again and the data is damning.

You would be surprised how many clients we run into with million dollar year marketing budgets but that won’t spend $3,000 a month on a solid SEO campaign. It is an absolute tragedy. How can you spend $25,000+ a month on paid search, when you have no control over how much you are going to be paying next year per click and spend nothing on SEO? In most cases, if you look at an SEO campaign and PPC campaign side by side after 1 year, the SEO campaign is producing as much if not more traffic than the PPC campaign at 1/10th or 1/100th the cost. This is not an exaggeration!

A lot of people are immediate gratification “ranking” oriented and lose sight of what SEO is all about. Here are the benefits of SEO, some of them you may not have known.

1. Free Traffic – that’s right, it’s free. This is one of the big questions I get from people all of the time. “Why would Google give you free traffic? They will need to dump that model eventually.” I have been hearing that statement for 13 years now and it is still free traffic. What you forget to realize is that a search engine is USELESS without the content that your site gives them for free. Search engines need your free content to satisfy visitors to use their search engines so they can monetize them in other ways…..So that content will always be there, and the traffic to your site will always be free!

2. Reputation Control – if someone types in your company name, product name or personal name, Google will find 10 results to put on the first page whether you like those results or not. An effective SEO campaign involves social media, articles, press releases, etc. and in most cases these will take up real estate on the first few pages, thus giving you control of how people see you online.

3. Offline support – whether you have a large outbound sales team that are educating clients on your product or service or you are one of the few companies spending 4 million this year for a Super Bowl ad, when these people are done listening to your message, they will most likely start searching online. You better be in the search engines for phrases they might type in to learn more about you. If you are not, and your competition is, they will get the sale you spent so much money trying to get.

4. Because your competition will – Starting an online business is easy, quick and cheap and most likely your product is not that unique. Sure, your purple widget may have platinum hinges, but guess what, your audience doesn’t know and they don’t care. They just want a purple widget for God sakes. So that is what they are going to type in when they start their search. Who is going to be there, you or your competitor?

5. Because people want to find you – that’s right, people want to find you. Google has billions of pages to crawl and unless you stand out, you won’t be found. If you have a good product or service, people want to find you. So why don’t you help them along the way?

You must do SEO or your company is not reaching its full potential. SEO is not the only thing that will make you successful, but it is a foundation, a piece that you cannot ignore. Spend at least 10% of your marketing budget on SEO and your chances of success will increase significantly.

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