BIz-Tech gets it: SEO is hard work

The term “Search Engine Optimization”(SEO) has been around since 1997, but managers charged with maintaining the online presence have often neglected their natural search rankings or viewed it as a one-time expense.  Just as quickly as the adoption of search engine optimization’s potential importance to web popularity became the latest trend, so did thousands of dubious black-hat SEO vendors selling the service as an a la carte one-time purchase. This further set the acknowledgment of SEO as a building block of web development. The most prevalent of the reasons why search engine optimization was ignored was a lack of expertise in knowing what expectations to set and what the results would look like.

The recent publication of the findings from Marketing Sherpa shows there have been large steps in the adoption of the website optimization as an on-going process. The amount of marketing managers in Business technology that actively budget for SEO has doubled in the last two years.  From the discussions I’ve had with clients over the past few years, I can see that this trend is both widespread and gaining popularity. 

More and more, Search Engine Optimization is becoming another advertising method to promote and drive sales. Natural search rankings, or those that appear without paid placement, are more trusted and generally more clicked on than the advertisements lining the top and right side of a result page. Budgeting your marketing dollars for SEO is, to your company, what budgeting for long-term investments is to your personal stock portfolio. Setting aside a small amount of your ad budget every month for updates allows you to slowly assert your website as more worthy of Google and Bing’s attention. Being diligent over the long term will yield results, perhaps not bringing you to front page for every search term (for that use Pay-Per-Click advertising), but instead will add to the total number of ways a new customer could find you.