The million dollar question

Pun intended. 🙂

Is SEO worth the investment?

It’s a great question, honestly.

In fact, you should be asking this question with all your marketing initiatives. Is Paid Traffic worth the investment? Is Social Media? How about all those trade shows and networking events you attend?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gets a bad rap when it comes to ROI analysis. Why? Mainly because SEO can be difficult to understand (how do you make sense of 200 different rankings factors??). It’s also slow to generate results, and without proper analytics is difficult to know if it’s working or not.

I realize I’m biased here (since I provide SEO consulting services), but SEO is powerful, and your business can’t ignore it.

Here are 3 facts that’ll prove that SEO is worth it, which includes your precious time and marketing dollars.

Fact #1: 89% of people use search engines to find information on products, services or businesses PRIOR to making purchases

When’s the last time you looked for a service in the Yellow Pages? Or, researched a business in an Encyclopedia?

Thanks to search engines, probably not any time recently.

There’s evidence that the Yellow Pages continues to decline rapidly (even though some people still use them). Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing in 2012 and shifted to a digital model (in hopes of saving the business), and Wikipedia growth continues.

Search engines are becoming the means to finding anything. I mean, come on, when’s the last time you “Googled” something at a stoplight?

Data proves that search engines are the new mechanism we all use to find information. If you want your business, product or service found in search engines organically (as in, not paying for it with Ads), SEO is how you get there.

SEO is worth it because…

It’s a main artery for generating awareness for your business.

Fact #2: There are 40,000 Google searches per SECOND

See Study

Think about how many times you Google something per day. 1, 2, 5, 20? You lose track quickly, right?

40,000 searches per second, 3.5 billion per day, 1.2 trillion per year (boy that’s a lot of googling). When I think of volume like this, it reminds me of how valuable SEO really is.

If you think your potential customers or clients don’t “Google” (because of industry or niche), show me the proof. I believe this volume of data only screams opportunity — even when search engine usage is speculated to be minimal.

I challenge you talk to existing customers/clients and see just how little they use search engines — the results may surprise you.

SEO is worth it because…

People are using Google way more than you think.

Fact #3: 16% to 20% of searches asked daily have NEVER been asked before

See Study

When I think of all these brand new searches per day, I draw these two conclusions:

1. More people are adopting search engines as their way of finding information
2. People are using search engines at a deeper level with long-tail searches (longer and more specific keyword phrases)

SEO is worth it because…

Your potential customers/clients are using Google more intelligently.

SEO is slow, but it’s 100% worth the investment

These are compelling facts.

Most people:

• have adopted search engines as their way of finding information
• are using search engines more and more
• are smarter about what they’re actually searching for

To take advantage of these numbers, you must be loved by the search engines. To be loved by Google/Yahoo/Bing, you need to invest in SEO.

Is it worth the investment? Absolutely. Just because SEO is slow (don’t expect results in “Just 30 Days”) and can feel like black magic (it’s not by the way) don’t let that intimidate you.