It’s often difficult for a business owner to see the value in a Search Engine Optimisation Campaign. That’s fair enough too, as traditional advertising generally provides instant or near instant results.
The problem for a small business owner considering employing a Search Engine Optimisation company to try to improve their search engine rankings is that there’s no instant results. The results take time (sometimes many months), which can be hard to swallow for a business which is hawkishly watching the bottom line.
There are, however, potentially great long term benefits to the small business-person to undertaking this sort of campaign versus traditional advertising. The most obvious benefit is the longevity of the results.
Most traditional advertising methods are one hit propositions. You buy ad space in the Advertiser newspaper, you’ll hit people who happen to be reading the paper that day, people who happen to read the page upon which your ad appears, and your ad is of benefit only to people within the above two groups who happen to want or need your products or services.
The same goes for television advertising, billboads, magazines, pretty much any advertising medium you care to think of. The obvious exception to this is the yellow pages, but even that is a one year only thing. Once your year is up, you need to pay (handsomely) again to have your ad placed in the directory the following year.
A search Engine Optimisation campaign, on the other hand, can have much more long-lasting results. Assuming that you business already has a website which can be easily modified, spending six or seven hundred dollars up-front, then a small monthly charge for ongoing tweaking, can see you ranking in the top ten for many terms related to your business.
The outstanding benefit of having high search engine rankings for the terms your customers are using to find your products or services, is that the people who come to your site via the search engines are actually searching for the products and services which you provide.
The minimum charge for a full colour ad in the Saturday Edition of Adelaide’s Advertiser is $1,100 (which only appears once, remember). Now of course you’d expect a boost in sales with this ad, but what about next week? Nada, Nothing, Zilch, if you don’t pay the $1,100 again.
Given the above scenario, that six or seven hundred dollars is looking awfully good. If your business makes $100 per sale of the products or services you offer, and you receive only one visitor per day to your website as a result of your Search Engine Optimisation campaign, and out of those one (extremely well targeted) visitors a day, one person buys from you per week, you’re making $100 a week you weren’t making before.
At $400 per month, you’ll recoup your cost in a couple of months once your website is ranking well, and making considerably more than the small monthly maintenance fee you’d be paying for the ongoing tweaking of your site.
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