Reasons why you should invest in SEO, and how it can enhance your visibility, attract more organic traffic, and grow your business in the long term.
Ieva Treiliha
Business owners can often be sceptical about search engine optimisation (SEO) when it comes to allocating the marketing budget.
They ask: “Is SEO actually worth it?” – and I completely understand why this question comes up.
SEO is a matter of trust. SEO takes time. SEO is a long-term investment. The timeline for seeing a return on your SEO investment is relatively long, which can make it difficult for business owners to see the value in investing in SEO.
I am often asked whether SEO is worth it. The question of whether you should dedicate a significant part of your marketing budget to SEO has many different aspects. But I will do my best to answer it in the following sections. Read on to see if SEO is an investment your business should have on the agenda in the near future.
Unlike paid advertising, it is not as easy to demonstrate the results achieved with SEO, and it is even more complex to illustrate the results you can expect after a certain period of time. There are no concrete dashboards in SEO that compare daily spend with sales revenue from conversions. This is why it can sometimes seem tempting to conclude that investing in SEO is too expensive.
First and foremost, it is important to understand what an “SEO investment” looks like from A to Z. An investment of 20,000 DKK per month in SEO is typically seen as an investment in an SEO agency or a consultant. But it is much more than that. SEO involves working on every part of your website to ensure it is both optimised for search engines and attractive for your customers.
This includes working on landing pages and content, structuring information, improving the technical performance of your site, and much more. Your SEO results depend on the products or services you offer, the keywords you want to be found for and where, how your website looks, how user-friendly and fast it is, how much content you have, and many other factors.
SEO therefore relies on many different resources and outputs.
You cannot compare SEO investments with paid advertising. For this reason, it can be difficult to measure ROI (Return On Investment) from SEO – it requires seeing the bigger picture. The investment and return timeline in SEO looks very different to that of paid advertising.
This does not mean that SEO is a bad investment – quite the opposite. However, it is important to recognise how much work is actually involved in SEO. SEO is costly, but it is costly because it includes many different tasks, which work together to deliver long-term results.
SEO is expensive – but at the same time, it helps generate significant revenue.
How do you succeed with paid advertising? Simply put – the more you invest in paid channels, the easier it is to see results. The more you are willing to pay per click on competitive keywords, the more visible you become. This is not to underestimate the significant work involved in Google Ads or paid social advertising. Paid advertising also involves analysis, ad creation, campaign management, bid adjustments, creative production, product feeds, and much more. However, in SEO, you are unlikely to become visible faster simply by spending more money.
So how do you succeed with SEO? You need to activate even more processes and resources to succeed with SEO. This applies both internally and externally. To better understand the real costs associated with investing in SEO, it is important to know what is required to achieve results with SEO.
One of the reasons companies deprioritise SEO is often because they believe they do not have the necessary internal resources to handle SEO tasks. It is not always a conscious decision to deprioritise SEO, but it is often a conscious choice to prioritise other tasks and disciplines.
Paid advertising is often outsourced and managed externally, whereas many companies wish to insource SEO. Larger businesses can often justify having a dedicated product team for SEO, but most small and medium-sized businesses cannot. Therefore, outsourcing SEO may be the right decision for many.
Outsourcing SEO has its advantages. You have more internal resources available for other tasks. You save on costs related to hiring and training an in-house SEO specialist. By outsourcing SEO, you gain access to dedicated specialist teams with expert knowledge and experience across a wide range of clients, enabling them to tackle the various challenges that arise in SEO.
Insourcing SEO also has its benefits. For example, you are not limited by a fixed number of hours dedicated to SEO each month. This means you can achieve your content plans and on-page optimisation much more quickly. In-house SEO specialists will also typically have better knowledge of your products and business.
Many small and medium-sized companies choose a hybrid approach – having a marketing employee responsible for some SEO tasks, as well as an agreement with an external SEO agency or consultant. In this way, the internal marketing employee is guided and supported by experienced SEO specialists.
SEO consists of three essential disciplines, meaning a good SEO specialist needs the skills to handle tasks within all three areas. Targeted and focused work in all three disciplines is key to your SEO success.
The ability to work across all three SEO disciplines is a critical factor to consider if you are deciding between insourcing and outsourcing SEO. Finding one person who excels in all three can be challenging. At an SEO agency, you will typically find specialists with different areas of expertise, ensuring all aspects of SEO are well covered.
As mentioned, paid advertising requires data analysis, strategy development, setting up campaigns and producing creatives. Yes, the largest cost is spend on the paid channels, but do not underestimate the other work that drives success on Google Ads and Social Media.
SEO does not have the same spend-related costs, but at the outset, the SEO budget goes towards developing a strategy, keyword and market analyses. The ongoing monthly budget is then spent on continuous on-page, off-page and technical optimisation, monitoring, and communication.
Strategy and analysis may not take up much of the budget, but execution of the various on-page, off-page and technical optimisations requires substantial resources, whether in the form of man-hours or outsourcing expenses.
These tasks can include everything from copywriting, link building, outreach and analysis, to working with structured data, speed optimisation, or updating title tags and meta descriptions across your site.
Working with SEO can be a complex, expensive and slow process because you are dealing with many disciplines simultaneously. This is especially true for companies not used to producing content, setting up landing pages, structuring their website, or conducting outreach for link building.
It can be difficult to calculate the exact return from SEO, and therefore also hard to define the precise costs of SEO. There is usually collaboration between internal and external teams, making it challenging to determine the actual costs of SEO work.
Many agencies manage to create a simplified view of costs – but the scale is much broader than that. There are always stepwise conversions happening. All in all, SEO delivers a strong ROI! It is simply a matter of seeing the full picture.
What outputs can you expect from SEO?
Simply put, it means better rankings on Google, leading to increased visibility, more organic traffic to your site, and consequently higher organic revenue.
These are the two main KPIs we use to measure SEO success.
There are also some smaller, so-called “soft” KPIs you can use to measure SEO success:
All of these KPIs help measure the effect and output of SEO.
If you want to increase your revenue with SEO guaranteed, you should know this analysis method.
SEO does not only impact organic traffic and keyword rankings. With search engine optimisation, you also improve the overall user experience for your customers. You become more visible to potential customers with optimised landing pages, and conversion rates will also improve on a fast, user-friendly website.
In this way, SEO also has a positive effect on other marketing channels. With optimised landing pages, you can achieve a higher Ad Rank in Google Ads and better click prices. You can read more about this in these articles: How to get lower click prices in Google Ads and 6 things you need to know about Google Ads.
In paid social advertising, you can also improve conversion rates if you direct your potential customers to optimised landing pages that are highly effective.
SEO work never truly ends. There will always be new, potentially exciting keywords to target, content to develop, and technical improvements to implement on your website. To effectively scale SEO, you should focus on the following four factors:
You need a clear idea of your SEO goals. Do you want more traffic to your site? Do you want to increase organic sales? Do you want to be more visible to potential clients? If you have specific keywords you want to rank for – which ones, and how many?
You need a concrete idea of what you want to achieve from your SEO investment to create an effective strategy and align expectations with your team or SEO agency. When your SEO team understands your goals, they can plan a step-by-step strategy to achieve them.
SEO can be an expensive investment that takes time to pay off. Building authority in search engines takes time and will not happen overnight. To succeed with SEO, it is important to stay focused and not give up, even if the results take longer than expected. With SEO, you have to trust the process.
Targeted and focused work across the different SEO disciplines, and adapting your strategy to the latest requirements and updates from Google, will deliver visible SEO results and help you scale your efforts.
When working with SEO, it is important to focus on low-hanging fruit where you can achieve quick wins. Once you have capitalised on these opportunities, it becomes easier to scale SEO and achieve larger goals.
Outsourcing specific tasks is also important for scaling SEO. Outsourcing time-consuming or complex tasks can save you time and in-house resources. Typically, businesses outsource copywriting, translations, and development work, but with strong supplier relationships, you can outsource a wider range of tasks as needed.
Investing in SEO is like buying a house instead of renting a flat. It may be more expensive, but the results do not disappear as soon as you stop the effort. The results of your SEO investment are often substantial and long-lasting, with benefits that accumulate over time and improve as you continue to optimise your website.
By investing in SEO, you are not only investing in better keyword rankings and increased traffic. You are also investing in the overall improvement of your website and the user experience. When you invest in SEO, you are investing in ensuring that your customers can find you for the products or services you most want to sell. With an SEO investment, you ensure your customers can find information about your products and services on your landing pages. And with SEO, you are closer to ensuring your website meets Google’s requirements for content, speed, and usability.
Yes, SEO costs may be higher than those for Google Ads or Social, but with SEO, you are improving many different aspects of your website.
The SEO value you achieve will not disappear overnight, unlike if you switch off paid advertising. It takes time to build expertise, authority, and trust with SEO, but it also takes time to lose it if you pause your SEO work.
Although SEO is a more expensive and long-term investment, it is definitely worth it. Contact us here to get started with SEO today!
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