“Cha-Ching” – The Sound of SEO

Converting the Search into Dollars

A couple of months ago I overheard a phone call between one of our Sales Consultants and a potential client. The dilemma was that SEO was too expensive for their marketing budget, “we can’t afford it, why is it so expensive? In our eyes, SEO doesn’t seem expensive at all – when you consider the amount of work and hours that go into one site and not to mention the return on investment.

The potential client mentioned above was advertising on buses, spending up to $8,000 and hardly returning. There hasn’t been a time where I’ve even read an advertisement on a bus, let alone taken the number down and given them a call. There was a stage when Yellow Pages was the place to go but up to 45K a year on a full page advertisement doesn’t seem right anymore, especially when return on investment is immeasurable!

How many times have you grabbed the yellow pages and been bothered to go through and find what you’re looking for? If you’re saying, “All the time” then maybe you should ask your grandchildren. Let’s face it, today’s generation is lazy. There are so many different things that make everyday processes faster – the internet being one. The internet revolution has become the core of creating brand demand, businesses now face a young demographic that doesn’t incorporate newspapers and other traditional advertising methods as a source of information.

It’s Mothers Day in a couple of weeks. With work and the million other things I’ve got to do I don’t have time to browse around the shopping centre for 2 hours. So what do I do? I Google, “Mothers Day Gifts”, millions of results but really I’m only going to look on the first page, aren’t I? Of Course! Because I’m lazy. I figure anything great is of course going to have a first page ranking. There’s no buses driving past here, no television blaring, I’m not reading a magazine or newspaper, the internet is readily available at any time of day. Imagine the millions of people at work Googling “Mothers Day Gifts” at this exact moment. Yet there’s still businesses spending their marketing budgets on yellow pages.

With the economy weakening more cost effective marketing strategies are sort after and 2009 has been named the year that SEO takes off. With Internet advertising expected to grow to 23% per year between now and 2010, SEO is going to continually get harder. So it is important for businesses to start their SEO campaign now in order to secure a place for the future.

Yes I know I’m ranting but compared to other advertising mediums SEO is the least expensive. It didn’t take long for the ‘potential’ client mentioned above to realise this – they have been a client of ours for over 2 months and have already started to see a return on their investment and they ditched the bus