The Often Overlooked Raw Power of Natural Search Engine Optimization
By Sage Peterson
December 2004
At our company we clip all the articles written about search engine marketing each week. And they all seem to have one thing in common: They all talk about paid search advertising, and not about natural search engine optimization (SEO).
While paid search has the "B-word" associated with it ("Billions," as in the $7 billion that Piper Jaffray predicts will be spent annually on it by 2007), natural SEO continues to be overlooked. Natural SEO drives value that often exceeds that of paid search advertising, but you won't hear about it much in the mainstream media because:
it requires good old fashioned elbow grease — hard work — to be successful
it's a process that spans a number of months
it produces an outcome that cannot be predicted with absolute certainty
nobody sells it on a cost-per-click basis
It's just not as sexy
But natural SEO has some structural advantages to pay per click advertising that few marketers consider when planning their online marketing budgets. Here are some examples:
SEO: rankings attained on keywords are not dependent upon your budget — they appear 24/7/365
Search advertising: your rankings disappear the instant your budget expires or are throttled on and offer throughout the day so not to exceed budget
SEO: it is not subject to click-fraud — click all you like and it won't cost you a cent — and the position of your page in the search results won't change
Search advertising: unscrupulous competitors can click you into the poor house and decimate your campaign, your budget and your ROI
SEO: top rankings on your most important keywords are not volatile — the position doesn't change that often
Search Advertising: in open auction, your position will change several times a day based on your competitor's bidding behavior
For one of our clients, a #1 ranking in the natural search result on a non-branded keyword drives 110,000 clicks per month — per month. That's some 1,320,000 unique search referred visitors per year.
And that's just ONE ranking. That company enjoys several thousand top-10 rankings across all the major search engines, driving tens of millions of visitors a year solely through natural SEO.
A typical SEO campaign may target anywhere from 200 to 10,000 keywords — the leverage is phenomenal because the search listings once attained, generate traffic and conversions for long periods of time. The downside is that a natural SEO campaign will require you to modify your website which takes some time, and initial results take anywhere from 2-5 months to appear depending on how quickly your organization can make changes to your website.
We still encourage companies to engage in both paid and natural SEO based search marketing strategies because it is important to cover the entire search results page with your brand (studies show people click ads and natural results about equally — you cannot afford to miss half the page). But we continue to hear about companies that produce breakthrough results with natural SEO — isn't it time for you to investigate the power of this little talked about marketing powerhouse called SEO?
