“I don’t need SEO right now.” I hear this statement quite often. The only way this statement could be true is if you are currently doing SEO or you’ve spent every last dollar of your marketing budget. I would even equate this statement to someone saying, “I don’t need to brush my teeth.” And yes, I did just say that!
Considering that everyday more and more people turn to the internet to make their purchases or research service providers, SEO is a necessity. Even if the purchase isn’t made directly on the internet, it is still a major part of the buying cycle. How many times have you gone on a search engine to research a product or someone’s services? My guess is more than once. If you’re doubting what I just said, then you’re probably wondering how I can prove such a crazy statement. You want numbers, conversion statistics, and dun dun dun… case studies!
You want to yell at the top of your lungs, “What’s the ROI in SEO?!?”
I recently came across a great guest post on Search Engine Land by Andy Komack, “Aquisition Marketers and the ROI Dilemma.” This post does a great job of addressing all the “SEO ROI doubters.”
Andy highlights the most basic points of using SEO as an acquisition vehicle:
- Purchase Influencing
- Awareness
- Creating a Voice
- Competitive Keywords Will Come to You
There are a lot of ways you can measure SEO ROI. First, you have to ask yourself what you consider the return on investment to be. Do you consider ROI to be more website visitors? Increased conversions? Brand recognition? Higher rankings in the search engines? All of these and more?
There are many web tools available that will help answer these questions.
- Google Analytics
- Omniture
- Core Metrics
Of course, tracking website visits and conversions is only half the battle. Interpreting the data is the tough stuff. You get into all the messy stuff like attribution tracking. Blek!
All that aside, SEO is becoming more and more necessary everyday. Mobile searches have increased drastically in the past five years, and mobile search will become more important to marketing efforts with the ever-changing technology available. If you’re not actively doing SEO, chances are you will find one of your competitors who are!