Hate SEO, don’t you? Here are the 8 reasons why you should love it (as long as it’s the ethical search engine optimization you’re interested in).
1. It Works For Everybody
It may sound like a basic kind of advice, but we want to guide your attention to what happened to the L.A. Times and their Oscars 2013 SEO campaign. Due to good planning and careful content publication (optimized content) their results were exceptional. Quote:
“It brought in 36.4 million pageviews and 5.5 million uniques the day of and after, up 61 percent from the previous year’s Oscars. Oscar Day traffic was up 50 percent and the day after traffic was up 38 percent from 2012.”
Even though the L.A. Times is a major publisher, it’s not the top one online, yet even despite this they were still able to dominate. The lesson here: If they can dominate the mainstream then you can surely dominate your niche.
2. Every Effort Matters
Creating a massive SEO campaign is great. But if you don’t have time for that, you can simply perform some optimizations here and there and the result will still be there (obviously, a much more modest result, but still a positive one).
3. You Can Mimic Others
Looking back at the L.A. Times we can say that they succeeded because their campaign was designed based on the previous years’ experiences. They researched what worked for people in the past and mimicked it when building their campaign. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do the same in your niche.
4. It’s (Kind Of) Zero-Cost Customer Acquisition
Even though preparing and then executing a quality SEO campaign costs money, once it’s running, getting an individual customer costs zero dollars. For instance, with AdWords you have to pay for a single click, with SEO the campaign costs “some” money, but the clicks that follow are free.
5. Build Brand Awareness
If you’re visible in the search engines, your brand starts to become more and more recognizable every day. This is an advantage that’s hard to measure in dollars, but it’s still there nonetheless.
6. SEO Traffic Is Stable
Despite the fact that your rankings change every day, the overall traffic you’re getting each month is pretty predictable. Therefore, if you have good SEO campaign working for you, you can predict the number of prospective customers that encounter your site, which allows you to estimate your profits.
7. SEO Builds Trust
If your site is #1 for some keyword phrase then it’s an immediate proof of your credibility in the eyes of your visitors. Whether we like it or not, people believe Google these days. Whoever is first, is simply the most trusted entity…
8. SEO Is Highly Measurable Marketing
As a marketing method, SEO is probably the second best measurable one (right after AdWords). You can check what spots your site is on at any time, you can check who’s your direct competition, you can estimate what impact would improving your search engine position have on your profits, and myriads of other things.