Optimizing for SEO – worst ROI ever?
May 14, 2009
There are a lot of good reasons for making your SEO company appear in Googles search result for SEO but to be honest is it really that profitable?
There are a lot of things to look at here, first of all, how do you value your time (or the time of your employees) and how do you value your own links. If you agree with me then you agree that these things have a value, at least you pay a salary to most employees I guess and your own time could also be measured as a cost. This is basic business finance and nothing new to most of us.
Targeting keywords such as SEO takes work and links there is not doubt about it, it’s one of the really competitive markets in SEO, for obvious reasons, the first being that every site you compete with has at least some basic SEO in the backpack. The guys on the front page of Googles result page have one thing in common they have invested a lot in getting there. If it is time, money or something else doesn’t really matter.
For this investment to be worth it you need to make more money from your clients than you actually spent getting there, this is obvious. The thing is I would claim even taht is not enough. If you spenf 1000 hours on your team or 50k dollars to get there and you make 500k dollars profit it looks like a no brainer but it doesn’t have to be true. What if you would spend the same resources to reach front page for another competitive keyword, let’s call it Poker. Ok, SEO has less competition than poker but the comparison is valid. How much money would you make from that? You would make a hell of a lot more profit, that’s the truth. My point is if you spend a lot of effort on ranking on SEO you are wasting your time and expensive skill, there is no doubt that you are a very capable SEO if you can get a top 5 on SEO but I would claim that you are not very smart.
To be honest, I do rank on SEO, not with this blog though and not in Google.com but in Google.se (Sweden) with my site that is in Swedish. I did it mostly to get bragging rights and it is, as I said before, stupid. The profit from it compared to the time spent getting there gives a bad, bad, bad ROI (Return of Investment). It gets even worse because I did it the old fashion way, trying to write as good content as possble, hoping for organic links. I really spent a lot of time on it. I made our designer spend at least 300 hours on the design, that has been updated 3 times. I made one of the devlopers build the best SEO-tool you can find and all of this for 50-100 visitors a day. Most of the visitors aren’t even potential clients as they are looking for tools to use when they do their own SEO (for their own clients).
If you want to take a look at it: Sokmotorkonsult. Sorry that it’s in Swedish but that is sort of necessary to get any positions in Google.se.
