Why should you invest in SEO? The short answer is maybe you should and maybe you shouldn’t. If you’re a business to business then honestly, I don’t think SEO is for you, at least not as a central marketing strategy. Most of your business is going to come from word of mouth. However, if you’re a business to consumer then SEO should be nothing less than your unequivocal, central marketing strategy and I’m going to explain to you why. This may be long but I urge you to keep reading. There may not be another article you read this year that will eclipse this one in terms of profit for your business.

 

The Only Reason You Need

SEO outperforms every type of marketing whether it be traditional or internet. It generates the most leads, converts the most sales, and has the highest ROI out there. This naturally leads to the question, “why?” The answer is simple. Consumers see Google, Bing, Yahoo as a neutral third party. SEO is the only type of advertising that you can implement that doesn’t look like advertising to the consumer. Why is that important? Because according to Econsultancy.com, 95% of consumers do not trust advertising. Compare that with this Rasmussen Report, that found 89% of people see search engines as good or excellent sources for finding relevant information. Between the two, we can tell that consumers see search engines as someone they can trust contrary to advertising. This is the crux of why SEO is so effective. People just trust search engines. That’s why Search Engine Optimization can be so much more effective than all other types of marketing. It makes your company trustworthy. There is no other type of marketing out there that can do this. Think about how effective your advertising would be if people actually trusted it. Seriously, stop reading this article and think about how that would radicalize your advertising…

This monumental fact alone should make you feral to get at SEO. However, if you’re still not satisfied, I suppose I could share some more insights with you. Let’s explore a few more features of the gold mine that is SEO.

 

How Many People Use Search Engines?

One of the first things we need to do before we go any further is to establish just how many of your customers are looking for your services on the search engines. This is fairly straight forward. According to a Kelsey Group study, 97% of consumers use the Internet to research products or services in their local area and 90% of those consumers use a search engine. No other type of marketing can touch this.

 

Do You Want to Own Your Home or Rent?

We obviously know the answer to this question. So, why do you only rent when you advertise? SEO is the only type of advertising out there (besides in some cases Social Media) that after you’re done paying for it, you still own it. When you stop paying for ads, they go away right? When you’re done with SEO, you can stay on page 1 easily for up to a year. SEO is still making you money…for free.

 

Be Influential in The Buying Cycle

If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve heard of the buying cycle (see infograph below).

The buying cycle should be very important to you because it shows you how your customers think when making a decision. Marketing attempts to tap into the buying cycle at different points in these stages to influence the buyer’s decision. Traditional advertising is really only effective at one of these stages: Need Awareness. Unfortunately for you, this is not only just one stage of the buying cycle, it’s the first stage. After this initial stage, as we said earlier, consumers don’t trust your advertising so, they’re normally not even going to let you be involved in the rest of the buying cycle which is heavily based on trust. They don’t trust you to truthfully present both the merits and shortcomings of your solution or to gather plausible alternatives for them (stage 2) and definitely don’t trust you to equally compare the merits of your solution to your competitors which helps them identify the best solution (stage 3). And because of this, you’re at their whim whether they arrive at stage 4 with you or not, the stage you’re most interested in: The Purchase Decision. Basically, with traditional advertising, the consumer sees your solution and after researching alternatives, if they feel like you’re the best option, they’ll come back to you. You now essentially have zero influence after you paid all that money to get their attention and chances are, someone else will capitalize on it because of the sheer number of competitors out there. You just paid money for another company’s sale, congratulations.

The good news is SEO gives you the chance to be the only company present in stages 2-4 out of all of your competitors. That’s a pretty big advantage. By being a company they can trust, they will let you influence them in those critical stages, something other types of advertising, even other internet advertising (PPC etc.), can’t do and something your competitors can’t do either.

 

Capitalize On Your Competitor’s Marketing

After reading all that above, this is relatively simple. Your competitor is obviously utlizing traditional marketing and they’re creating that need. If you have SEO, guess who is showing up while people are researching that need? From here on out, every time you see your competitor advertising, thank them for advertising for you.

 

Let SEO Start and Finish Your Sales

Since SEO can get into all the stages of the buying cycle based on trust, it is the only type of marketing that can start and finish a sale for you on its own effectively. It can walk the customer through all 5 stages by the hand and have you come out on the other end as the champion with relatively little work from you. This frees up your most important resource: time. SEO frees up time, it frees up money, and freeing up time and money frees up your life. You can sit back and actually turn your attention toward your business while SEO churns out top production.

 

Utilize Your Most Powerful Branding Tool

If you’ve studied “branding” you know it is absolutely essential to your company to brand yourself at every opportunity. The more often you are recognized, the more prevalent you are in the customer’s mind and it reinforces your company. Now, take this into consideration. Once your traditional marketing or other internet marketing initiatives create the need or make the consumer aware of their problem, chances are they’re going to the search engines to do some research. Once again, 90% of consumers do. How effective is it for you to reinforce your company as soon as they do a search? Not only did you create their need but when they went looking for other solutions you’re there again. Not only are you showing up again but you’re showing up through a medium that they trust. You’re cementing your company as the go to company in your area for their needs. Branding is powerful and SEO is the most powerful branding tool available to you.

 

Conclusion

I seriously considered comparing all types of advertising to SEO piece by piece but I’ll leave that possibly for another day. The point is, this is an exciting time. There has never been a piece of marketing that stands so heads and shoulders above the rest and the proof so well documented. By reading this article, you have given yourself an inside advantage that you need to capitalize on immediately. You don’t have long before your competitors pick up on what you now know and by the time they do, you need to be miles ahead of them. In fact, your competitors may have already read this same article and are trying to get a head start on you.

So, what are you going to do about it? If your competition hasn’t even started on SEO yet, be the first player there and reap the rewards. If you’re behind on SEO, all it takes is knowing someone who knows what they’re doing to beat out your competition. Whatever your situation, you should understand SEO is king. The battle for you is finding an optimizer that knows what they’re doing.

 

*If you want to consider us for your SEO needs, we urge you to give us a call. You can read about our search engine optimization.