Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been a buzz phrase for many years already. There’s even an entire industry that focuses just on SEO. Depending on your goal and ambitions, SEO can quickly absorb massive amounts of your marketing budget. This makes a lot of marketing managers and business owners wonder if SEO is a waste of money or not? Let me try answer that for you with a quick “why”, “what” and “how”.

Why is SEO important?

Let’s look at “why” first. If you’re wondering why SEO matters then maybe the 3.5 billion search queries per day on Google will help you understand how many people look for information on search engines. In fact, there are over 40 000 people looking for information on the internet every second.

Now the numbers may sound amazing and they already might be getting you excited. However, I think it’s important to look at the behaviour of buyers and how that behaviour has changed. Back in the day, people would be happy to be told that they needed something by salespeople. These days, people want to know why they need something, how it will benefit them and even how they can do it themselves. This may be scary to some but I think this is a massive opportunity for you to present yourself as a thought-leader in your industry that will build trust with your visitors and ultimately lead towards sales.

What is the best way to get SEO to work for me?

This all sounds great but you’re probably wondering what to do to tap into this massive opportunity. Data is showing that content is the best way to not only rank high in search engines but also set yourself apart as a thought-leader. More importantly, people are starting to make sure they get qualified leads by creating quality, targeted, content.

Creating quality content sounds great, how do I go about this?

So, how do you tap into and leverage content to both educate your visitors and improve search ranking? Content takes on many forms these days from basic text based mediums like blogs and ebooks to more rich forms of content such as videos, webinars and podcasts. All of these can be used to improve search ranking (PDFs can already be understood by Google and all the other content isn’t too far behind).

The easiest way to get started is by creating quality blogs and ebooks that have the main objective of educating users. You want to make sure the content gives each visitor bites they can take away to give them something to remember you by. This leaves visitors happy which is the main objective for search engines like Google who are always trying to perfect how great content reaches their users.

To finish up, if you’re still wondering if SEO is a waste of money then this last point should make you realise that it is not. As much as Google and the likes will factor in the age of the content, they’re suckers for quality content. So, just like those songs we all sing along to from the 70s and 80s, your content could sit on Google for months and even years to come. So that investment you made for good content now could still be generating leads for you in years to come – now just imagine if you continue creating content on a monthly or weekly basis?