Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is not a strategy to leave on the back burner, and it shouldn’t be viewed as an expense. Instead, view this work as an investment into your company. Organic SEO won’t deliver big gains in a short period of time. The wins are incremental, and over time, you’ll see a huge return on investment (ROI) from your efforts. Read on for more on why organic SEO is an investment you can’t see immediately but will have major benefits on your brand for the long term.
Build a Strong Organic SEO Strategy
When you start on your organic SEO journey, you will invest a great deal of time in building out a strategy that’s going to be effective. In order to get the most out of this investment, a lot of time needs to be dedicated to researching how you’re going to execute the strategy. It’s important to keep in mind that the strategy needs to be in place for at least a year to understand its full benefits. Ensuring from the start that you’ve crafted a strategy that will deliver is of the utmost importance.
Organic SEO is a Cost-Effective Strategy
When you compare organic SEO to paid marketing efforts, the cost of organic SEO is significantly lower (and could cost your practically nothing extra). Instead of setting aside a budget for paid search, you put in a time commitment to improving organic SEO. This work is likely something you’re already doing in your company.
Your company is already creating copy, such as on your website and in blogs and articles. As your team strategizes your content, organic SEO should be a primary focus. Optimize the content you produce with your target audience in mind, so the right people find your brand. Utilizing copy with target keywords, adding external and internal links, and sharing valuable content factors into your organic SEO.
Organic SEO Supports Marketing Efforts
Content marketing, such as blogs and articles, serves to inform and educate your target audience. Readers respond well to this type of content because they find value in it (which is something the algorithm appreciates), and this supports other marketing efforts in your company. When you focus strategically on organic SEO, you attract users from each step in the funnel without the cost of paid search.
When more people in your target audience can find and learn more about you, it increases brand awareness, social media communities, email marketing signups, and more. You build a strong community with the right people, and that is always beneficial to building and growing your business.
Building Organic SEO Has Long-Term Benefits
As you continue building your content portfolio, specifically a combination of content on your website and a backlink portfolio, your organic SEO is strong. When you have a solid foundation of content available online, there is an increased opportunity for your target audience to find you.
In addition to the increased chance of your target audience discovering you, you’re also showing the algorithm that your brand provides SEO-friendly content that people find value in. The result? Increased search engine rankings, traffic, leads, revenue, and more.
The ROI of Organic SEO
Naturally, in business, you want to know that the marketing efforts you’re putting in are giving you a return on your investment. While organic SEO doesn’t have a direct price tag attached to it in the same way paid search does, you are investing time into your team to build and strategize this content.
When evaluating the ROI, you have to think long-term. Ideally, you want to review the year-over-year (YOY) benefits of your investment. That means that when you create an organic SEO strategy, it needs to be well-researched and well-thought-out from the start. To truly evaluate its progress, you need to stick with it for one year to be able to evaluate the ROI. On average, a strong SEO strategy will deliver an increase of about 40% in organic traffic YOY.
Conclusion
In business, it’s tempting to constantly check how your strategies are performing. But with organic SEO, putting in the time and effort into building a compelling strategy and then putting in the work to execute it takes time. It’s a blind investment during the year, but after you’ve stuck with it and reviewed YOY results, you’ll find the investment was absolutely worth it.
