SEO is simply a lazy persons way of saying search engine optimization. It is the procedural and artistic effort to manipulate the pages of a website in such a way that search engines such as Google and Yahoo fall in love with the pages. What happens when it is love at first sight? You go to the top of the rankings for the keyword phrases detailed on the pages of your site. If you pick keyword phrases that people use to search for things, you should get free traffic. As you are reading this text, you should be realizing you constitute just such a visitor to our site!
This site receives about 30,000 to 50,000 visitors a month. Our cost in “getting” these visitors is $0. The only other way we could effectively produce this much traffic would be to run a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords or Yahoo. As you can imagine, internet marketing services tend to be competitive, so the average cost per hit on these platforms would be around $3. Assuming we generated 30,000 visitors, our cost would be $90,000 a month [$3 x 30,000 visitors]. Does SEO really work? $0 or $90,000 – you do the math!
In all honesty, this example is a bit of a half truth. With your site, you are going to need to hire a firm such as ours unless you want to spend a couple years learning SEO for yourself. Most businesses don’t have the time, but it is an option.
SEO professionals are not the cheapest. You can expect to pay thousands each month for a good company, which is still a lot less than most PPC campaigns. Where you really start to make hay, however, is in the long run. There is a secret about SEO. The longer your site is up, the higher you will rank if you make an effort to SEO it. Ultimately, this leads to a situation where your site just sits in the top rankings and pulls in free traffic day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Sound nice? It is! It’s like owning the hen that lays the golden egg each morning!