Web Design & Marketing Blog

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Category: Blog

Written by Estevan Montoya

In the last few years search engine optimization or "SEO" has become a huge hit with businesses all over the U.S. The reason is because they are under the impression that organic search engine traffic is free. Organic search engine traffic is free although it’s usually a substantial investment in order to get into the position where you’re even getting any traffic at all.

So in reality, the organic search engine traffic isn’t free, there is an initial investment you’ll be paying to an SEO company in order to be placed higher in the search engine results.

So why are you paying an SEO Company do this and what is the actual ROI? This is actually a very important question.

1. You’re paying an SEO company like VivaNet 2.0 or another company simply because we’re able to analyze the information in order to make the best decision of which kinds of keywords and phrases we should be targeting.
2. What is the competition of the keywords you’re going to be targeting?
3. How much would it cost just to pay for these keywords in a pay per click campaign rather than the initial SEO investment?

Sometimes the keywords you’re targeting are extremely competitive. For example; Web Design or Web Consulting is a keyword that VivaNet 2.0 would target, although since the competition is so high, it’s not really a very good return on investment since it’s such a massive investment to get into the top rankings for those keywords. Also being top positions for those keywords would take many thousands of dollars a month in order to stay there. It’s a much better ROI to target thousands of low competition keywords since once we’re at the top we’ll most likely stay at the top for a while.

Let’s say the competition for a keyword you’re targeting is somewhere around the middle. So it’s not very competitive although there is some competition. In order to get to the top 3 positions, you’ll probably spend around 25 hours to get there.

So you take 25 hours and multiply it by $65/hour which is about average, so you’re paying $1,625 to be in the top 3. This example keyword gets about 5,000 searches per month. So since you’re in the top 3 you’ll probably receive about 50% of the traffic which is 2,500 unique hits per month. So your initial investment is about $0.65 per unique visitor.

The cost to just pay for the Pay per Click position is $0.25. This means that you only have to wait about 2 and ½ months before you start seeing a real ROI. This my friends is why SEO is turning out to be such a hot item.

Keep in mind though, if the keyword has medium competition, you’ll still have to do some SEO maintenance. Although for something like this, it would probably only be about 2 hours a month. So this is still an amazing investment.