Organic SEO Is Already The Most Valuable Asset Your Website Possesses

There’s no debate among the people making money online that search engine traffic is the #1 source of their income. Individuals may have odd niches here and there that get their traffic from elsewhere, and in particular Internet entrepreneurs seem determined to pursue off-the-wall traffic to make their riches, but the vast majority — well over 80% — of money-making hits across the Internet come from search engines (and 80% of those come from Google.)

So let’s say you have a website and you’re just getting off the ground. You’ve gotten yourself indexed by the Google spiders, but that’s the sum total of the work that you’ve done: what’s your most valuable asset?

It’s still organic SEO. Yep, even on Day 1. The moment that the Google spiders index your site, you’re showing up somewhere in the rankings for relevant keywords — and at the very beginning, that’s all you’ve got.

Now, you can change that, of course. If you invest in pay-per-click advertising, learn the arts (or, more realistically, hire a PPC management firm to run your campaigns for you), and deal with your traffic costing real money per visit in exchange for the privilege of only paying for those visitors who actually make it to your site, you can quickly build a campaign that will become more valuable to you than your organic search listings.

But in the long run, as your site grows in popularity and audience, you will eventually find yourself in a position where your own success has acted as your “SEO guy” — and the traffic you could have had in months of paying for SEO will start to appear after mere years of pay-per-click. That traffic, purely free, will out-value the paid-for PPC traffic (it’s hard to beat an RoI of 1 on an I of zero.), and once again, organic SEO will be the most valuable asset your website has — because in the long run, is ultimately always was.

There’s no substitute for good SEO — there may be replacements, but there are no substitutes.