SEO Is Not Free

In my day time guise as an ecommerce guru I deal with a lot of web sites and a lot of business people, and all seem to have the same misguided misconception of Google.

Firstly most people believe that listing highly in those critical keyword terms for their business is hugely profitable.

And secondly they seem to be of the opinion that getting there is free.

It's my experience that clicks from SEO visitors (people who clicked your page on a list of google results) spent about 30% of what people who click an ad buy.

The reason is simple and down to a number of reasons. One of the most critical is that pages which rank well in the search engines will often appear for more than just the keywords you are targeting, and some of those phrases may be research related.

Also pages which are being delivered to organic terms may not be particularly well targeted for all of the searches for which they appear.

Finally a visitor who clicks an ad is very definitely in the mood to buy, your advertisement appealed to them and they were under no illusions that it was not an advert. People clicking ads are most definitely "buyers", whereas people clicking an organic search result might not be.

So having established that a lot of traffic from SEO is worthless, let's tackle the issue of it being free...

For any page there are a number of keywords with which it might perform well, and the most profitable of those will have stiff competition from your rivals.

All of them will be vying for that top spot on Google, many of them will have been in the business several years and will have a tonne of juicy backlinks and page rank from all of the history of their site, forum discussions linking them and talking about them for instance, twitter links and maybe even they are reaping the benefit of an SEO strategy.

This means that to compete with them you can't do just what they are doing, but you have to do more because they have more history.

So you invest time, energy and resources in to building well meta tagged pages, implementing Google schema, you send somebody off to start blogging about you, you give some loss leaders to forum community members to talk about you, and you may even employ an SEO farm to throw some page rank your way.

All of these resources cost money, and the nature of SEO means that you categorically will not see the benefit of your expenditure for 6 months to a year and sometimes more.

Finally, after massive expense, you are rewarded with some healthy traffic levels from a plethora of people who are not interested in buying anything, and if you are too successful this might put a load on your server, and so you have to develop load balancing solutions to split your traffic over more machines.

But on the plus side, all of this new traffic is of course free.

Totally free.

*cough*

When setting up a new site I always run with PPC (pay per click advertising). PPC gives me the chance to test the market and deliver a result in days to weeks (in some sectors it can be as long as about 2 months for DIY sites and expensive products, but usually the PPC click to sale time is within a few days).

If a site fails to perform with a PPC campaign then a lengthy SEO campaign is not worth the massive investment of time, resources and infrastructure. Instead what it needs is a review of the actual offer, or some conversion rate work.

So if SEO is an expensive way to get results, is there a better way? Yes, with all my clients I recommend a process of CRO once it is achieving regular sales. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) delivers tangeable and measurable results, it is statistically driven and its effects easy to measure.

If your web commerce provider is selling SEO as anything other than a "follow best practice and we'll deal with it after doing CRO" basis then they are idiots and you should fire them.

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