Is SEO Even Worth It?

If you have trouble understanding the value of SEO, you should know that you’re not alone. Why would you devote time and resources to a marketing strategy that will not produce results right away? Wouldn’t you be better off investing those same resources in a marketing channel that will lead to immediate results (like paid ads)? 🤔

Well, the thing with SEO is that it’s not just a marketing strategy. We often tell our clients that when they invest in your website, you are also building your product. A website that is fast to load and provides valuable answers to users is much more than a great way to meet new customers. 

If you own an e-commerce site, your site is the place where your customers come to browse through your products. It’s also where you can answer their questions and guide them toward making the right decisions. 

Your site is like the store to which they will return if they had a good experience, and it’s the address they will pass on to their friends as a recommendation ✅ It’s even the URL to which you can redirect your paid ads!

Renting A House Vs. Building Your Own Home

So, is SEO even worth it? In our minds, there is no doubt about it. 

But if you’re still unconvinced, here’s an analogy that may help you understand what we mean: paid ads are much like renting a house, while with SEO, you are building your home 🏠.   

Paid Media = Rent 💸

Using paid ads for leads or conversions is much like renting a house. You pay rent every month and get to live in a house that you currently don’t have the time or resources to build. 

When you were young, it was by renting that you got to move out of your parents’ house. However, as you grew older, you started to think that getting a mortgage was probably a good idea. 

Why? Because the thing with rent is that the moment you stop paying, you no longer have a roof over your head.

Let’s imagine you’re in the lumber business. The average cost-per-click for “lumber liquidators near me” is $8.48. That means that every time a potential customer clicks on your ad, you will be paying $8.48. If you decide to remove the ad, you will also immediately lose the incoming traffic and potential leads. 

Now, let’s look at what would happen if you decided to implement an SEO strategy, along with your PPC strategy. 

SEO = Building A Home 🏡

SEO is a lot more like building your own home. It will probably take longer to build, but once you have the foundations, you’ll get to live in it rent-free.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t have to fix a cabinet door once in a while or won’t want to upgrade your bathroom. But if you’re suddenly jobless, you won’t have to worry about where to live. 

Building a sustainable SEO strategy is a medium and long-term investment. Building a healthy site that provides users with great answers to their queries is like building a home where you can live for many years.

Using the lumber business example above, let’s imagine that you built a “Lumber Liquidator” landing page and filled it with good content that is useful for your potential customers. A year has passed, and the page ranks on the first page of Google’s Search Results for people searching for “lumber liquidators near me”. 

You’ll probably realize that you can scale back on your PPC spending (and save those $8.48 per click) because you’re getting all the leads and conversions you need from organic traffic alone.    

Don’t know where to start? Start with the foundations 🚩

Even clients who see the value in SEO sometimes get lost in all the technical stuff. SEO can get complicated and too technical very quickly. 

But, at the end of the day, it all comes down to 2 things:

  1. You want a healthy website that Google can crawl and index
  2. You want great content that is optimized for the right keywords and that shows you’re a subject-matter expert

These are the solid foundations on which you want to build your home. Once you’ve built that, you can start thinking about home decor (a.k.a., backlinks, schema markup, snippet bait, etc.) 

seo pyramid for branding

ScaledOn Can Help!

Whether you’re starting a brand new site or own a decades-old website that takes ages to load, our team of experts can make an initial diagnosis and then come up with a plan to make sure you are building your future on solid ground.

Our SEO packages are designed to meet you where you are right now.