Myth 3 – SEO is too expensive
Actually, SEO is probably the most cost effective form of online marketing. Organic SEO is cheaper to set up and maintain than a PPC (pay per click campaign) or banner advertising. With PPC and banner advertising, you mostly pay for clicks or impressions. With SEO, all clicks are FREE. You simply pay for the set up, monitoring of your site and time that is spent promoting your site.
So what is organic SEO? It’s actually quite simple. Let’s take a flower as an example. It starts off as a seed that gets planted, you give it water and some good soil and eventually it will sprout, start growing roots and after a while will peek out of the ground and start growing upwards. As you take care of the plant it grows more and more and eventually you see a blooming flower.
This is basically the same with organic SEO. You start off with a website (the seed) and take care of it. Remember a website grows in stages just like a plant. You can’t put up a website, wake up the next morning and “Voila!” you are on top 10 in Google. Organic SEO is also known as “White Hat” SEO as it involves 80% human input and 20% aided by technology. “White Hat” SEO also focuses on the actual content of your site. Yes sure, aesthetics is important to, but there is no point in having a nicely designed site but search engines cannot read the content correctly. Remember people use search engines to find information, hence the saying “Content is King” so you have to make sure your information is optimized correctly.
As I’ve said to a lot of people in Port Elizabeth, I would rather focus on getting them high organic results then spending time and money on sponsored listings.
In closing, remember that the information you put on your site is what gets you found.