Affordable SEO Means Settling In For The Long Haul

Affordable SEO is at the top of every webmaster’s “to get” list. But the SEO industry isn’t like most others — having your website optimized for certain keywords such that they show up first or second when people search for those keywords on Google isn’t like buying a hamburger, or even like having your bathroom renovated. It’s more akin to, of all things, getting an annuity.

Annuities, if you’re not familiar, are interesting financial instruments. You pay in every month for a long time, and then suddenly they ‘mature’. Once they mature, rather than you paying in, they pay out — every month for the rest of your life. SEO operates similarly.

Every month, you pay an SEO company to build backlinks for you, and to optimize your existing online content for the search engines. As time passes, the stack of backlinks pointing toward your website grows, and your website creeps slowly up the search engine results pages for the keywords you’re targeting.

Then one day, you reach a point — usually, it’s the first page of a highly-competitive keyword, or the top three slots of a less-competitive keyword — and suddenly the payout comes. Visitors start trickling in, and you start making sales solely from the organic traffic you get from Google.

The difference between an annuity and your website’s SEO is twofold. First, you don’t ever stop paying into SEO — but on the flipside, the benefits from SEO continue to grow for as long as you pay in (unlike an annuity, which pays out a fixed amount each month forever.)

Every month you continue to pay into your SEO ‘fund’, the backlinks keep coming, and your website scores a higher rank for the keywords you’re targeting. If you achieve an optimal rank in one set of keywords, it’s easy to swap some out and start building toward more of them. The price never goes down, but the benefits keep going up with each passing month.

What that means, to bring things back around, is that the longer you spend paying for SEO, the more affordable — and more effective — it becomes. You can search for the best deal per backlink or whatever other criteria you choose, but in the end, there’s no such thing as affordable SEO at the beginning — and at the end, the only SEO that isn’t affordable is the SEO you stop paying for too soon.