The death knell for search engine optimization (SEO) rings so often and so loud, sometimes intelligent marketers can’t hear themselves think. The latest: “SEO Deadheads” claim personalization is pushing SEOs out the door. Others cry the complexity of universal search, or any number of innovations by the search engines, now makes effective SEO impossible.

Wrong. SEO remains one of the best investments any marketer can make.

Most folks would hold firm to the reason they do SEO: drive relevant traffic to their sites. They hope this relevant traffic will result in more leads and/or more sales. Those are great reasons (and will be part of this list), but there’s a lot more to consider. A whole lot more.

Five reasons SEO rocks PPC:

10. PPC and CPC: Not Your Lenin’s CCCP: Paid Search, AKA PPC or pay-per-click search marketing, is no communist manifesto. Online marketing’s ultimate expression of capitalism may be the pay-per-click auction. It’s as close to a free market free-for-all as you can get, with one exception: marketers buy their way into the GYM (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) and Ask, as well as other major search engines.

So PPC isn’t really a free-for-all. It’s a “free-for-none.”

Companies, large and small, jump into the pay-per-click arena due to its simplicity. It’s easy to choose keywords and bid, bid, bid.

The benefits: advertisers set a monthly budget, choose the text (or creative), and choose landing pages that show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

The downside: the rules of paid search are so simple, playing is easy. Many, many companies are already in the game. The more companies involved in the auction, the higher the CPC (cost-per-click) and, in general, the lower the chance for a significant ROI (return on investment).

Moreover, when budget runs out for a given month, advertisers may lose their presence in the search engines.

With organic SEO, Web sites can — and do — show up 24/7/365. While SEO can’t “guarantee” any site owner high rankings in search results, you can spread your presence across a multitude of keywords. As long as sites have pages/content to support selected keywords, SEO can deliver a more consistent presence across all the major search engines.

9. High Cost of Competitive Keywords: If your traffic-driving keywords are highly competitive, “buying” a regular presence on the major search engines may be cost-prohibitive. Outsourced SEO may provide the presence you’re looking for at a fraction of the cost. If that’s an option you’d like to explore, make sure the firms you interview devise a solid strategy to get you where you want to go. Again, though, there are no guarantees in SEO. But, over time, with a diligent plan, some great things can be accomplished.

Companies must measure the success of SEO campaigns by hard metrics: growth in targeted organic search traffic increased number of leads or increases in sales volume, for example. Many clients and prospects, though, tend to gravitate to ranking reports to see how their presence has increased or decreased against a given set of monitored keywords.

8. Ad Blockers Tackle PPC Ads: I was reading this week, in Advertising Age, about Adblock Plus, which blocks not only pop-ups and banners, but paid search ads as well. No question some people just want the editorial. With organic SEO, you’re there. If you think about the adoption rate of pop-up blockers (who, reading this article, doesn’t already have them installed?), then you might want to be a little concerned about the adoption rate of ad blockers now tackling paid search. Certainly, search ads are often relevant and mostly unobtrusive (in my view). However, consider the number of people who download ad blockers and enable the “block all ads” function. Something to think about.

7. Organic Clicks Rule, Naturally: No matter what study you believe — and there are many — a great deal of evidence shows that more people click on organic results than paid placements. Some studies suggest around 60 percent of searchers click on organic results. Others indicate the percentage is much higher. In any event, organic results get the majority of the clicks, which means organic gets you the best results.

6. Search Engine “Seal of Approval”? No search engine gives a seal of approval or endorses any companies that come up in organic search results. Nor do search engine endorse companies that advertise in their paid-search networks. However, when your site ranks high in search engine results, there’s a strong case for user perception of “implied endorsement.” When you advertise in paid search, many — if not most — searchers realize you’ve paid to get your Web site in the sponsored listings. With organic SEO, the user will likely believe in the ability of the search engine indexing to deliver relevant results.

There’s an unspoken consensus that if a search engine ranks your site as relevant, you must be a leader in your field.

  5. ROI: From all of the search engine optimization programs I’ve overseen (I’m guessing that the number is around 250), there have been few that have not generated a positive ROI. For those that didn’t, it was due to a failed business plan or a poor user experience on the Web site. A properly planned and executed search engine optimization campaign generates a terrific return on investment, so long as you plan for search engine optimization to be a long-term commitment and not a three-month tactical strategy.

I could share with you a case study in which one of our clients received almost $ 11,000,000 worth of organic traffic to their site from January to May of this year. And, I should add, they are not in a “popular” space (that is, they’re not selling consumer electronics, or something else with a high number of searches performed against it). I determined this value by looking at the increased number of clicks from organic search, year over year, and valued this by their average CPC from their Google AdWords campaign. And you can be certain that we didn’t charge anywhere near $ 11,000,000 during that five month time period.

4. Interactive PR: Perhaps you’ve had some bad press. Perhaps those mentions are showing up in Google when someone searches for your company name. These things can be addressed. There are search engine optimization methods that can help to push those “bad” results to the second page, and leave positive results on the first page.

A good case study in Interactive PR is Wal-Mart, in which there are Web sites such as walmartwatch.com and wakeupwalmart.com that are not exactly flattering to the company. These Web sites rank within the top  ten results on Google for the search phrase “walmart.” I have witnessed steps taken by Walmart to deal with this issue, but these two Web sites still rank. Through tactics such as creating a charity website (walmart.org could be a Web site set up to speak to their charitable efforts, for example), you can almost assure yourself of having one less of these unfavorable Web sites showing up in the top  ten results.

3. “Unlimited” Clicks: You don’t set a budget, as you would with PPC, and have the budget dry up by the middle of the month only to leave you hanging until the first of the next month. Once you’ve achieved rankings, the clicks just keep on coming. Too often, PPC clients must daypart their efforts or otherwise manage when they will have a presence in the search engines. What about that off chance that a good prospect was searching on a Sunday afternoon? With an organic presence, you will be there 24/7 to capture all the traffic that you can. As mentioned above, there really is no limit  – other than the total number of searches being performed– to how much traffic your site could receive from organic search engine optimization efforts.

2. Production of More Quality Content: The more you focus on organic search engine optimization efforts, the more likely you are to add quality copy to your site, which is good for both SEO and the user experience. Certainly, there’s a balance to be had between having too much and too little content. You do not want the user to get lost in reading or to miss the point of converting into a lead/sale, etc. In some cases, you have to be creative. Including things like tips, reviews, forums, blogs, and other insightful information can be good for the user experience and great for search engine optimization. I’ve witnessed Web sites built with no intention of doing well in the search engines do well due to the fact that they were focused on providing great content for their visitors. These things go hand in hand.

1. Accessibility: A good search engine optimization firm will help you to make your Web site more accessible to those with disabilities (Section 508 compliance), which also makes your Web site more search engine friendly. Part of building an accessible Web site is making sure that internal linking (links within your Web site pointing from one page to another) includes your keywords within the link itself.  A blind person using a screen reader to navigate your Web site will know the link saying, “email marketing services,” is pointing to the page of your site about “email marketing services.”

When you focus on what’s good for visitors (understanding that some of these people may be affected by some form of disability), you will also help your SEO efforts. Conversely, a good search engine optimization firm should be able to assist you in making your Web site Section 508 compliant by making your Web site more search engine friendly.

So, if you didn’t already believe that search engine optimization was a worthwhile investment, you now have a few more reasons for putting in the necessary time/energy/money to help your business grow through SEO.

Source: searchenginewatch.com