More Bang for Your SEO Buck in 2020

It’s 2020 and it’s a jungle out there folks. So put on your safari attire and strap on the elephant rifle cause its about to get real….

Real competitive that is. Your competition is relentless, consumers are more scrupulous, and costs of marketing your business are going thru the roof.

So where does search engine optimization fall into this battle scene? Is there even a place for optimizing your blog in 2018? To that we answer a wholehearted YES. Certainly we’re a bit biased when it comes to SEO, but the numbers don’t lie:

• 80%+ of consumers still run to Google as the first step in researching a new purchase
• Online reputation and reviews drive trust factors and conversions
• Ads are delivering diminishing returns as consumers are becoming “ad blind” and are unwilling to be “sold” to
• 70-80%+ of web users AVOID paid ads altogether clicking ONLY on organic listings
• Over 55% of purchase transactions can be traced back to sites found thru search engines

So with those numbers in mind, optimizing your site should be priority # 1 in 2018…and if its not, or hasn’t been up until this point, you’re already falling behind in the pack.

With PPC costs rising out of control and display ads losing their effectiveness, SEO can yield a very respectable ROI, and dollar for dollar, is still a really solid long term play.

While every dollar invested in paid ads gets you a 1:1 ratio of “impressions” or views, every dollar spent in optimizing your site can yield exponentially more clicks, views and engagements over time (sometimes for years to come).

Additionally, because a main focus of SEO is the generation of high quality content, your links and brand name are often shared organically (and sometimes virally) by others as people find your content useful or relevant to them and their social or work circles.

In fact, one press release submitted for SEO (i.e. backlinks) can go viral across news syndication to the tune of 100s of thousands of sites, reaching an audience of millions overnight. This is especially true if your syndication gets picked up by Google News.

Thus, in the above example, your $125 press release may have yielded an ROI reaching into the 1000s% range.

Can be Effectively Executed on any Budget

Whereas with paid media and ads your dollar only goes so far. If you have a fixed budget of $500/mo that $500 comes and goes with the clicks and impressions never to be seen again.

With search engine optimization, you can allot as little as ZERO dollars (or rather some sweat equity) or as much as your budget will allow.

No matter which scenario your organization falls into you can find creative ways to execute and ENTIRE optimization strategy on a shoestring budget and still yield solid results.

The following are a few “low to no cost” suggestions:

• Offer to conduct and publish interviews of sellers of synergistic products and services on your blog. For example, if you run a fitness blog, you could reach out to personal trainers or supplement sellers and offer to do a written or audio interview to be published on your or other sites.
• Reach out to bloggers and offer to do a guest post swap whereby they write an article for your blog and you write one to be posted on theirs
• Utilize a number of “free” press release syndication services online…sure you won’t get into Forbes or the Washington Post, but you’ll get good distribution regardless, and hey, its free.
• Reach out to social influencers or admins/moderators of social pages in your niche and ask if you can provide their readers with some free content, a coupon, etc. in exchange for a backlink
• Reach out to others in your niche but not directly competitive to you who have email lists and ask if they would be willing to send an email to their audience on your behalf (i.e. offer something of value).
• Optimize your on-page SEO. This is free if you know how to do it yourself, or you can hire an SEO agency to help you with the process. Building backlinks without first optimizing your site is like putting a turbo-charger on a Toyota Prius, it might sound cool but its not going anywhere fast.
• Hire an SEO firm to help you develop and execute a proper link building strategy. Just make sure you vet them well as there are unfortunately a lot of scam artists in the industry…and even in 2018 this hasn’t changed.

The above are only a handful of ways in which you can quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively launch an optimization campaign that is certain to get your site the visibility it deserves in no time flat.