The Truth About SEO

In the world of digital marketing, it can be easy to get caught up in the hype of the latest and greatest tool or strategy. But while those new tools and strategies are exciting, they often aren’t relevant to your business. That’s where proven, long-term strategies like SEO come in that provide concrete results over the long term.

When it comes to short-term gains, like driving traffic to your website for a specific promotion or sale, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as Google Ads is a great option. With PPC, you’re paying each time someone clicks on your ad. You can target ads at certain keywords, locations, devices, and demographics. PPC is a good light-weight option if you’re selling something online, but unlike SEO, which is an investment in your business, short-term paid advertising is an expense that often doesn’t provide any long-term benefits. You may get a short-term bump in search rankings with PPC but ultimately, if your rankings don’t increase, your business won’t see the kind of growth that it could achieve with SEO as a principle marketing strategy.

The truth is, SEO is an investment. It takes time, energy, and education to reap the benefits of an optimized website. In fact, SEO is often referred to as both an “invisible” and “inconvenient” business strategy. Complicating matters is the fact that the corporate world is notoriously impatient, often demanding immediate results and ROI. But in the case of SEO, it pays to be patient. Just like investing in your business, if you’re not investing in SEO, you’re missing out on promoting the credibility of your brand and attracting potential customers to your website.

With the risks and costs of implementing SEO being what they are, it is understandable to hesitate over utilizing an unfamiliar strategy. With SEO, however, the significant growth that it can prompt in your business often speaks for itself.

Here are some advantages of SEO over PPC:

• Cost - PPC is typically more expensive than SEO. One of the biggest risks of paid advertising is the potential for wasted spend. If you’re not careful, you can easily end up spending a lot of money on ads that don’t generate any ROI. Many businesses spend their entire marketing budget on advertising campaigns that don’t improve their search ranking at all. While PPC can be a useful tool in your overall marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure that you’re targeting the right audience with the right ads. After all, once the ads end, so does your traffic.
• Trust - People are increasingly wary of online ads, especially younger users. In fact, many users block ads altogether. SEO is more effective than PPC because it generates higher quality, long-term traffic that is more likely to be interested in making a purchase. In fact, users are 18 times more likely to click on organic search results than an ad. Remember that PPC may entice users to click on your ad (and you’ll get charged for this click), but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll make a purchase.
• Effectiveness - SEO uses a variety of proven techniques to drive organic traffic to your website, such as creating high-quality content, building a blog that attracts visitors, promoting your content via social media, and optimizing your website for high-quality traffic. People are drawn to your content because they find it interesting or useful, and Google rewards these types of websites with higher rankings.

The bottom line is that SEO works! It is more effective in the long run than PPC because it provides a sustainable and continuous flow of qualified traffic to your website. Unlike PPC, organic SEO generates more trust with users and helps build your brand. Users are more likely to click on a result from a search engine than on an ad. This trust enables users to make a purchase or take other desired actions on your website.

Let newData help you create a scalable, repeatable, and profitable SEO strategy that will boost your online conversions and revenue. We will create an SEO plan that is tailored to your business goals, objectives, and current ranking. We’ll also ensure that your SEO efforts are compliant with Google’s continually-changing guidelines and best practices, so you can be confident that your campaign is optimized for maximum search results and organic traffic. newData is an SEO company based in Nashville that will help you reach your marketing goals faster, more effectively, and more cost-effectively than other SEO providers. Contact us today to get started.