Business benefits of SEO

Posted 13 July 2007 14:35pm by Graham Charlton with 9 comments

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Search Engine Marketing helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness.

There is more to search engine optimisation than just marketing, as companies can derive many business benefits from using SEO. Let’s take a look at a few...

• Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
  There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume, low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (eg ‘car insurance’). 

  It can also be useful for generating visitors on the long tail of search. Many companies bid on these phrases through paid-search, so giving opportunities for those who use an SEO strategy for the tail.

• Fixed Costs
  The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimisation costs and lower ongoing optimisation costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.
• Brand Visibility
  Think about that search on ‘car insurance’. The big insurance companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it either need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.
• Focus on Web Standards / Accessibility
  Designing a website for search is an exercise in designing a best practice website. Search engine crawlers notice errors in your code, so valid code is a must for SEO. And that makes for a healthier, more accessible website. Accessible for Google’s crawlers, and for people.
• Repeat Business
  Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!
• Customer Acquisition - Targeted Prospects
  Search is demand-driven, so anybody referred from a search engine is hoping that your web page matches their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to see, they may well become your next customer.
• Focus on Unique Content
  We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this. Remember that quality content attracts quality links. And that links are still very important for SEO. So if you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.
• Credibility / Brand Perception
  “Why aren’t you in Google for ‘car insurance’”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?
• Findability
  Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product review, a person…

For more, see our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Business Case , which aims to help you persuade the boss that your company needs to invest in SEO...