SEO is Dead Again in 2014

Before the ridiculous articles start hitting in 2014 about how “SEO has died” (again), let me set the record straight with this pre-emptive strike.

If SEO was dead every year some moron said it was dead, then it must be a cat going on it’s 9th life in 2014.

How do I still know SEO is Alive & Kicking?

We practice what we preach-and we see the return on investment (ROI) for our business as well as our clients.

We rank our site for our own competitive, new client producing terms. Even if we charged ourselves what we would charge clients for ranking at the top of Google for phrases like “SEO Denver”, or “Internet marketing Denver”, we would be making a tidy profit. Simply put: If we did not profit from it we would not do it.

Furthermore, if we did not know that our customers profit from it we would not recommend it. In fact, we don’t recommend SEO for everyone. It does not work for every business model, but for the vast majority it does.

Isn’t SEO Expensive?

SEO pricing for the most part, when done well, is market driven. What this means is that if you are www.farmers.com you will only have to invest more time and money into a superior SEO strategy over the long run than your competitors invest to continue to come up number one for the search term “auto insurance” like Farmers did at the time of this posting.

While this effort likely costs them six figures a year in time and/or dollars spent, the return for them in residual revenue is more than likely very profitable.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the search term you are trying to rank for is “cheap gas”, and you only need to come up in Denver Google Local search, you will invest a lot less.

Again, the amount of effort you have to put into SEO depends on what the potential return is for your efforts. This is because your competitors are not likely to do much more than they have to for their site to rank, because it would not be profitable for them to do so.

If you stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by being in the top 3 spots for your most valuable search terms, then spending tens of thousands of dollars a year is well worth it.

While there are examples of companies like Farmers or Geico spending so much money that they lose money on customer acquisition for months or even years, even they have to be profitable in the long run.

Avoiding Wasted Money on SEO Efforts

Some businesses spend too little time and/or money on their SEO efforts, and as a result they end up on the second page or worse for their efforts, which rarely leads to a lead. This is like building a fifty foot bridge to get across a 100 foot body of water. If you do that you are simply wasting money.

Of some businesses spend too much money on poorly implemented SEO efforts resulting in an even worse experience.

Before you embark on an SEO campaign you need to understand what it is going to cost you to be ranked well enough on profitable terms to get ranked. Aside from just getting lucky, this is the best way to determine what your ROI will be over the long run. When you choose your solution provider, you need them to be able to show you examples of their success in markets as competitive as yours.

How do you know how much you need to spend on SEO to be profitable? Stay tuned-that may be my next post.

For more information on our SEO or other Internet marketing services, please give us a call at 720-985-7945.