SEO is not worth for every business

Is SEO worth it or not for your business? the answer is “depends”. Search Engine Optimization is not necessarily a good fit for every business. A lot of people think that it is, but it depends on a lot of different factors.

For some businesses, 1 website can make them millions of dollars per year in revenue from free search engine traffic. For others, they pay big teams or expensive consultants tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to, in some cases even, millions of dollars per year trying to attract this same free traffic yet completely fail and make little to none of their money back!

Sometimes, SEO is okay in terms of you doing little things here and there, but there is not enough of a market to justify hiring an expert or a consultant or an in-house SEO team.

Beware of bargain basement SEO services that ultimately offer nothing. They do a few things up front and then they charge you a low monthly fee and call it SEO. They are not really doing anything. In most of those cases you are better off learning a few things yourself and trying to do the best you can, because otherwise it is just not worth the money. You want to explore the idea of trying social media or direct mail or other forms of marketing that my fit your business better.

If you ask for an analysis from me, this is part of the process I go through. It is not all of it, but it is part. This is important for me because I want everyone who invests heavily in SEO to get an outsized return. It is also something you need to consider when hiring a SEO consultant or company.

First, who is your target market?

Hopefully you have done this in your own business development, defining your target market. Who are they? What do they want? What are they thinking? What are they looking for?

We want to look at this via search engine optimization. What are they typing into the search engines? If you know nothing about them, if you have not really thought about them, then it is going to be more difficult to do this. Sometimes it is not hard, like if you are a dentist. Well, they are searching for dentists, or they are searching for cosmetic dentists, or they are searching for children’s dentists, or whatever.

Not all markets are that simple. A lot of times in simple markets there are unique opportunities for people who are willing to really walk the full path of doing their marketing research and doing their SEO research thoroughly. A lot of people do not do this, so that leaves some low hanging fruit for a lot of businesses. I often find a lot of low hanging fruit where all you have to do a little bit of work and you can attract that traffic for years to come.

Once we try to understand your target market, what kind of traffic can you conservatively expect?

There is tool called Google Keyword Planner, GKP for short. It is imperfect. It is actually a part of the Google Ads (previous known as Google Adwords) tools. If you Google ‘Google Keyword Planner’, it will be the first link. You put in your keywords and it gives you keyword data back and you can actually download it to Excel and it will give you up to about eight hundred keywords. Then you can put more keywords back in and get more out. A lot of those keywords are not going to be relevant, but a lot of them will be. This will give you a decent idea of the traffic now.

An important secret: The lower the volume your traffic, the less perfect Google Keyword Planner is. The lowest number they give is 10 per month. Searches less than 10 per month is, in my estimation, about 75% of the total search traffic out there! This traffic is harder to find, but much easier to rank for typically.

If it is a huge market that gets searched millions of times a month, you are going to receive good data on it. If you are a local market and it is something that gets searched under a thousand or even ten thousand times a month as a whole, there are going to be a lot of keywords missing.

If something gets searched four times a year or four times a month, then it is going to show zero. What does that mean to you? What if that is a highly targeted searcher who is very valuable to your business? A single visitor or customer of that type could make $10,000 for your business. Is it worth it to try to target? Absolutely. There are ways to figure out these low volume search phrases. I have some techniques that allow us to try to find these hidden gems.

This is very important, but at the same time they leave clues. I want to be able to find these clues. Sometimes the numbers do not say they are in search traffic, but we use our brain, we do some other sleuthing, and we can say, “I still think there is traffic here. I still see a reason why there would be traffic, and it is just a bunch of low volume and they are not showing.” Even some higher volume traffic do not show in here. This is a tool intended to show people how to bid on their paper click ads. If they do not think there are a lot of people bidding on it, or there are not a lot of people asking for it, they do not put it in there. It is an imperfect tool, but it is the best tool we have in terms of what is actually getting searched. It can sometimes debunk a lot of ideas, You can think something gets searched a lot and it does not. Sometimes you doubt it get searched at all and you go on there and go, “Wow! This a huge market and there are so many different was in which people are searching for it. This is awesome.”

Researching what your market is searching deeply is a really, really important step. A lot of people will do this step pretty quickly and not thoroughly. Doing it thoroughly really enables you to try to target as much of the market as possible. What quantity of traffic? What kind of conversion rate can you realistically expect? This can be one per cent, or even half a per cent, or it could be as high as fifty er cent or more, especially if you have a strong call to action. People are not going to wait around. They are not going to look around and read around on a plumber site if they ahve a giant leak. If the shower handle brakes off and water runs out they ened a plumber right then. They will not wait around. If you do your research, your conversion rate is higher right along with being able to rank for searches your competition doesn’t even know exist.

If you are selling goods online, your conversion rate is going to be lower, especially if it is a high dollar item. Conversion rate can mean different things. Is it a customer? Usually this means a contact or turning into a lead. Did they send you an email? Did they call you? Sometimes it means just straight up buying. Did they sign up for your email list? There are a lot of different ways to define this, but generally I define it as getting a lead.

How much gross profit do you make per sale, in terms of the twelve month value of customer excluding fixed costs? Or the one-a-month value? The lifetime value of a customer? If you do not know these numbers, this is really important for your business. Start tracking them, or start trying to figure them out or a least estimate them because how will you know how much money to spend acquiring a customer if you do nt know how much they are worth? If you do have these numbers, that is great, and it is something that will help you figure this out.

What position you are and what click through rate you can expect area really important to track, as is the exponential drop off nature of the click through rate. The difference between being number one and being number fie could be ten times the amount of search volume for a search phrase. A lot of people will think, “I am on the first page.” Great. Well, you are number eight versus number one. What is the value of mediocre a low value SEO versus high quality SEO? Say mediocre SEO gets you to eigh. That means high value SEO can get you to two. Let us just say two – that alone is worth at least tn times as much. That is something very important to consider. The rewards go heavily to the victor. Powerful SEO is worth a whole lot more than even good SEO.

Make a very rough calculation, so to check if SEO is worth for your business

Now, we’are ready to make an estimate of the value of SEO. (Traffic Expectation of Successful Project) X (Website Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate) X (Lead to Sales Conversion Rate) X (Gross Profit Per Customer) = Estimated Potential Value of SEO.

These are all important considerations to understand if SEO is worth it for your business. It goes beyond what I am detailing here, but these are the basics of “Is SEO worth it to you?” If you would like me to do this for you and you think that there is a good chance SEO is worth it or you are really curious, then feel free to contact me and I’ll take a look at your site and your opportunities and let you know what I think

Do you have different points of view or question? Please leave a comment below.