SEO and Business

Usually companies have paid marketing budgets which are used to reel-in paying customers. However, marketing budgets aren’t infinite and can only go so far. In contrast, SEO can potentially bring-in customers without any bounds, unlike paid ads.

For small businesses, SEO can be especially beneficial as it provides an affordable and effective way to reach potential customers and compete with larger businesses. By optimizing their website and content for search engines, small businesses can improve their visibility and attract more qualified leads, even if they have a limited marketing budget.

For large businesses, SEO can be a crucial component of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. By consistently optimizing their websites and content for search engines, large businesses can maintain and improve their visibility, attract more qualified leads, and stay ahead of the competition. Additionally, SEO can help large businesses target specific audiences and increase their brand awareness on a global scale.

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is a financial metric used to evaluate the profitability of an investment relative to its cost. In the context of SEO, ROI signifies the returns gained from the resources and efforts invested in SEO. SEO efforts usually require a significant upfront cost, and the payoff is over the lifetime of the artifacts (e.g., blogs, posts, etc.) produced as part of the SEO exercise. Compared to paid advertising/marketing, where the feedback loopback is almost immediate, SEO takes time to implement and generate returns. Thus, some SEO experts don’t suggest funding SEO efforts if the business is in the very early phases of being set up and still looking for a product-market fit.

However, once SEO starts to bring in customers, the channel can continue to pay back for years.

Attribution challenges

One of the difficulties of measuring SEO success for businesses is having the ability to determine if a customer or a prospect was acquired via the SEO channel or otherwise. Consider Educative.io as an example. The platform publishes blogs on Medium, and these serve as an SEO channel. A learner who reads an Educative blog on Medium and decides to buy an Educative subscription can’t be tied cleanly to Educative’s SEO channel. Tracking conversion is trivial with paid ads, where a customer clicks on an ad and then signs up on the platform.

Some companies choose to invest in infrastructure to measure the success of their SEO channel, but doing so adds up the cost of SEO for a company. Any company would have to balance their marketing budgets between SEO and other paid forms of marketing. Spending too much on SEO runs the risk of not getting enough returns when compared to running paid marketing for the same budget. Some easy ways companies use to track SEO success is asking customers in the sign-up forms of how they heard about the company. More sophisticated technical approaches can also be adopted by companies to track and measure SEO channels. For instance, Educative also publishes a lot of free and useful content under its own domain name called Answers. Clicks or conversions from a company’s own platform can be much easier to track using query parameters, scripts, or tools compared to those received on a third-party platform such as Medium.

Distinction between SEM and SEO

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and SEO are two crucial components of digital marketing that help businesses improve their online visibility, drive organic traffic to websites, and attract more qualified leads. Both SEM and SEO have the same goals but use different techniques to achieve them.

SEM involves purchasing advertising space on search engine result pages (SERPs) to reach potential customers. It typically involves using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and bidding on specific keywords to get higher placement on search results pages. Advertisers can target specific geographic locations, device types, and audience demographics and pay only when someone clicks on their ads.

The main goal of SEM is to get immediate results by reaching potential customers who are searching for specific products or services at the moment. It is a great way to get quick visibility, test the market, attract new customers, and get in front of the target audience right away. SEM is a paid advertising channel and involves paying for ad placements through Google AdWords or similar platforms. In a sense one could consider SEO as a subset of SEM, where the latter includes the former, in addition to paid advertising.