Burying your head in the sand about these five SEO strategies can affect your bottom line.

Just because you can run a business in 2018 without doing search engine optimization does not mean you should. By actively doing so, exposes you to unnecessary risks and leaves money on the table.

Making the case for financing search engine optimization in a business is usually met with familiar objections such as it being too unpredictable, that solid results take too long to materialize or that it’s altogether erratic. There is also an incorrect interpretation that ROI is not as solid as PPC or other social media outlets. Any reputable SEO company knows that it is highly measurable and in most cases a much better value for the money than both social media outlets and PPC.

Here are five ways that rolling in SEO into your marketing efforts could positively affect your bottom line.

1. Using PPC as a Replacement for SEO

Many businesses have tried to resolve the SEO vs. PPC debate by calculating an ultimate conversion rate for both. While several of these studies deliver valued insight into both paid and organic traffic, there are a number of variables that cannot be captured by a simple percentage. SEO might target keywords for stages of a sales funnel while PPC campaigns send leads directly to a sales page. In the end, you can steer your clients to a specific product or service over a longer period of time for less marketing dollars with SEO every time.

2. Lucrative Niches – Missing out and Misunderstanding

Many have summarized that optimizing for a few high-traffic terms in your niche will suffice. But the truly most valuable part of SEO is blueprinting the thought processes of your customers. Once you’ve figured out the master blueprint you can design the rest of the building with ease. For example, finding out that you need to optimize keywords as state-based and not city-based could help you from missing out on a potentially huge pot of revenue.

3. Google Update Unpreparedness

The core algorithm Google update in August 2018 (known as the “Medic” update) caused widespread reports of traffic losses, principally in the health and wellness segment. Some webmasters suggested that the update ruined their businesses.

In order to mitigate this kind of risk, you should be stacking your SEO foundation with best practices to help adversely impact any updates. For example, once the smoke had cleared from the initial damage of the Medic update, sites that had instituted the “E-A-T” philosophy employing expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness and had focused on quality content and building trust and authority with their audience with a robust SEO strategy in place found they had minimized their sales impact.

4. Non-Strategic Site Redesigns

As stunning as it may sound in 2018, many businesses still hire companies with little or no idea about SEO to redesign their sites – face plant.

Remembering to call in an SEO adviser at the last minute on a redesign is going to hurt when they find out the site is completely programmed in JavaScript, or that your team has made some serious technical error that will almost certainly result in a Google demotion. There is no magic way to fix these types of issues. They are costly do-overs that take time, effort and additional budget that could have been avoided had the proper planning been taken into account initially.

5. Lack of credibility and trust

There is, of course, a direct relationship between organic traffic and sales. Ignoring SEO will assure your business will miss out on many of the provided benefits such as credibility with consumers and a dominant presence of the first page of Google search results across your industry. It’s, undoubtedly, the best PR and will strengthen the perception that your company has authority and expertise.

If you ignore SEO and your site rarely appears or not at all in organic listings, it may make consumers more suspicious of your credentials and even affect the conversion rate of your PPC ads.

Conclusion

It’s certainly possible to run a successful business without SEO. However, you’re holding yourself back from even greater sales and success by leaving opportunities sitting on the table for your competitors to snatch up.