Before we can answer the question is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) worth it? We have to understand the true value of SEO.

Let’s start with the actual definition of SEO, according to Wikipedia ‘Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)’ is: “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search result”.

That definition doesn’t mean anything to a business owner with a website or thinking about creating a website to generate leads.

My explanation of what Search Engine Optimisation  means to a business owner ‘SEO creates more leads for you’. Now we can answer the question ‘YES’, SEO is worth the effort. If you want to increase your business, get more leads or make more money – then the answer would still be, YES!

As a Brand & Communications agency we’ve been managing our own SEO for a few years now.

Why? We were sick of paying companies who could do nothing more than to offer a very technical synopsis of our website. Most couldn’t put it into a ‘real world’ context of how SEO could add value to our business or even generate leads.

Through trial and error (and heavily reviewing the results) along the way we’ve had quite a few successes with SEO and managed to replicate the same success for many of our clients.

Here are the top 5 SEO successes we’ve personally had:

  • By heavily promoting and target specific key words as part of your SEO you can see your website being ranked on the first few pages of Google. Our website has moved onto page 1 of Google for our keywords.
  • Achieving presence on page 1 of Google increases your leads for new business. We have doubled our average leads on a weekly basis.
  • Adding a blog to our website and blogging at least once a week our interactions (shares, comments and likes on social media) went up by 400%. This increased our ranking online – another strategy which we encourage ALL of our clients to adopt as part of their marketing.
  • Using eDM’s (electronic direct mail) helps SEO overall and drives traffic to (and through) your website. Our average click-through to our website increased by over 700% when we started a regular program.
  • Increasing the number of social media outlets you use (ie expanding from using only Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn, to include Instagram, YouTube and Google+ for example) improves traffic stats to your website.  Our traffic increased by 25% on a monthly basis.

Any business wanting to leverage their SEO has to understand that there is no ONE SINGLE component of SEO that works for ‘all businesses’. There is NO MAGIC TRICK and it is no ‘one model suits all’.

SEO is a combination of small frequent actions over a period of time that first creates SEO and then builds a very powerful tool to generate leads and new business.

The application of ALL of these strategies will have a DIRECT impact on the sales of any business.

Like all business entrepreneurs, we too forget to work on our own SEO. So what happens when we don’t work on our SEO? Quite simply, our phones stop ringing!

What SEO have your implemented in your business to keep the phone’s ringing?