According to a recent study from Hotwire, 79% of all marketers do not include SEO in their budgeting. This means they don’t intentionally spend money to improve their rankings in the search engines. Given all the talk about SEO throughout the industry, this number comes as something of a surprise to many people.
The majority of marketers are focusing their budgets on pay per click campaigns or some other type of marketing campaign. While there is certainly a place for PPC and other paid advertising, one must wonder why so many people are avoiding SEO. Paid marketing is effective only as long as you are feeding money into it. SEO, on the other hand, can produce long term results that simply can’t be found anywhere else.
Of course, to be effective, SEO must also receive some money to pay for new content, links and other things. At first the investment seems to produce little to no results, but over time it will lead to a steady stream of traffic with minimal ongoing investment.
There are many factors that contribute to marketers choosing to keep SEO at arm’s length. First, the world of SEO is unpredictable. At best it is an art and not a science, so marketers could invest a significant amount of money today only to find that a Google update eliminates all their efforts. If you’re going to invest time or money on something, most people want to be able to be confident that it will produce results (which PPC certainly can).
Another reason many marketers likely shy away from SEO is that there are so many ‘experts’ who are pushing their services on them. Successful marketers won’t go more than a few hours without getting some sort of email or other contact from an ‘SEO firm’ that can ‘guarantee’ them top results on Google. Of course, the vast majority of these are just people trying to make a buck off the latest SEO fad.
While there are certainly issues associated with SEO, marketers are making a big mistake by avoiding investing in this area all together. Putting effort into ranking organically in the search engines will certainly yield long term results so whether you’re marketing your own small business or a fortune 500 company, make sure SEO is getting at least a fair piece of your overall marketing budget.
