1. Blog

Can you justify the cost of SEO services?

SEO: With so little loose cash in companies, and a huge need to pull in punters, it's a good time to ask whether you can really justify the cost of SEO services. Virginia Cruz takes a closer look.

It might be you’re reading this because you’re already a strong believer in the benefits of SEO, but you need to justify it to your boss.

Inversely, you may be that boss struggling to understand why you've got people on the phone and your in-house marketing team banging on about SEO when, well, hasn’t its time passed? Isn’t digital marketing all about social media now? And anyway, you possibly know already that you can’t afford it.

As with any investment though, we need to separate out the justification for SEO services from the cost, and turn our attention instead to something closer to most commercial hearts - profitabilty.

If you have any marketing budget at all at the moment, you’re likely trying to work out where you’ll get the most (or any) bang for your buck. Let’s take a closer look at SEO, make sure you’re up to speed on what it really is and how it can really help. Then you’ll be able to compare its potential for yourself.

What is SEO again?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. At Disquiet Dog, we talk a lot about ensuring your organisation occupies its rightful place online. But that’s the minimum. If you really heed what search engines like Google are looking for, and optimise your communications with that in mind, then you have the clear potential to outsmart the competition, and appear in front of significant world audiences when they search online for the kind of thing you’re offering.

SEO: no longer a bolt-on service

Marketing used to be one tiny function, largely cut off from an organisation. Nowadays, marketing it is very much how people think in organisations – think of how feedback, social media, customer service, new product development are at the heart of what makes a company tick.

In the same way, search engine optimisation is no longer a bolt-on extra you can choose to have or not have. SEO is the way you do everything else when it comes to digital marketing. SEO is intrinsic to:

  • The technical specification of your website
  • Your website’s design
  • User experience (UX)
  • High quality content production
  • Your social media outpourings

Today’s SEO means working with Google, not against it.

It is possible that you or your budget boss still associates SEO with search engine manipulation, rather than search engine optimisation. Unfortunately, early SEO did mix good practices with more suspicious techniques. That’s simply because the Google search algorithm was unsophisticated enough that you could get to the top of the heap by being sly, rather than being brilliant and of benefit to society.

Thankfully, Google picked up on this, releasing several major algorithm updates over the years to penalise dubious practices and ensure that the good guys – the ones aiming to make the world wide web a better place for humans to find what they want - benefitted from better ranking positioning.

SEO can make a massive difference to your bottom line

It’s probably obvious that the only real way to justify the cost associated with SEO is to provide clear examples of the potential for a return on investment. In general, SEO and other digital marketing approaches end up being more cost-effective than more traditional offline, face-to-face marketing initiatives, and in many cases, they will have a longer-lasting effect.

What’s more, in the midst of the global pandemic, many of those traditional routes to getting the sales you’re after have also vanished. And some won’t be coming back for a bit. But anyone can say anything these days. Let's talk bottom line.

Bosses are always talking about bottom line. If you're uncertain what that means, the bottom line of the profit and loss account shows the profit you’ve got left when all the sales are in and all the costs paid out. It’s kind of what everything seems to be about these days.

The more you optimise your digital presence, the more you attract the people who most want to buy what you most want to sell them. SEO is all about providing your potential clients with the best possible content and information, in the best possible way, so they get what they want.

Depending on how well your organisation appears at the moment in the search engines, it may well be a bit of a slog at first. But we know, because we work on SEO day in, day out with our clients, that when you get to those top spots, you corner your part of the market, and the business rolls in in a way that paid advertising and every other costly means of drawing people in, cannot beat.

Hit that first page, and it’s like turning on a tap that need never turn off again.

Make it even more affordable by doing SEO yourselves

The other news is that so much of SEO, once understood, can be achieved in house at much lower cost than from the long-term outsourcing of SEO to a digital agency.

We pride ourselves at Disquiet Dog in handing over the know-how and empowering you to do it yourselves through a range of options including marketing training, seminars and webinars, monthly support and consultancy.

If you are going to put together an in-house SEO team here’s your quick checklist:

  • Make sure that you are all on the same page around SEO technique, so you only follow positive SEO practices that you won’t regret in the future.

  • Aim for original and quality content, don’t borrow and steal, or re-write your competitors’ stuff. Dull.

  • Build a fast website that performs well – speed matters
  • Always seek to improve user experience, so your clients love you more and more.
  • Work from a solid SEO strategy, in other words:
  • Understand your current position in the marketing place, decide where you’re heading, create a plan of action and measure your success.

Get it all right, all your SEO ducks in a row, and the bottom line will justify the cost of SEO all on its own.

Virginia Cruz is a senior SEO and digital marketing consultant for Disquiet Dog.