If You Have a Website, SEO Is Your Friend

There is one simple fact that is true of every single website: SEO is that website’s best tool for getting traffic in the long term. SEO — Search Engine Optimization — is the practice of arranging your on-page elements and acquiring backlinks from other pages in order to make your website look good to the search engines.

SEO is vitally important to obtaining one critical thing: traffic. If you rank at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for several good keywords, people will find your website and read it. If you don’t, you have to pay, one way or another, for every visitor that comes to visit your site. Either you’re paying for them individually, like with pay-per-click marketing, or you’re paying for advertisements like a brick-and-mortar business would.

Of course, you can — and probably should — pay for SEO services, too. Trying to do your own SEO on top of everything else you need to do to get your online business off the ground is like pausing in the middle of a marathon in order to do a quick triathlon. The difference between paying for SEO and paying for traffic, however, is enormous.

When you pay for traffic, you pay a (more or less) fixed cost per visitor. Your bids might be higher on some keywords than on others, but you’re still paying some amount for every visitor that comes to see you.

On the other hand, when you pay for SEO, you’re investing in future traffic. Your visitors per dollar will pretty much suck for the first couple of months. But as you invest more time and money into SEO, the returns get better and better until they blow pay-per-click marketing out of the water.

Of course, there’s nothing keeping you from doing both PPC and SEO at the same time — in fact, if you can afford it, it’s the preferred way to go — but if you have to pick one over the other, organic SEO is always going to be better in the long term.