Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have been listening and reading on StartupNation for a while now, but I have never participated. I feel I am much too small to be giving advice, and I am at a stage that is probably under entrepreneur. Now my time has come. I have a website earning no money. –No I don’t need a critique- I read a forum string called, “SEO | How much $” and started thinking. At what level of business does an online retailer start using a professional service?

I have heard reliable testimony stating, sales on a site are likely to increase by 40% with well executed SEO. If I earn $0 a month on my site, and have 10 page views a day, will SEO help me? I tend to think if my sales became $10 per month that would only be $120 a year earnings (before all the tax and licensing fees). The cost to implement extremely good SEO is about $2000 a year, I think. Therefore, in order to use professional SEO experts, a site would need to be doing $167 a month after expenses, in order to invest $2000 a month. Of course with these numbers the business is not earning and consuming a lot of effort.

What do people think of this? At would point does SEO become too expensive, and some other winning method must provide sales?



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SUN: Hottest place in the solar system.

Great question UnwantedNews... You may have answered your own question. I believe there is a time when "professional" SEO writing is demanded by the business in order to achieve another level. But I also think that SEO writing is less important if your product pages do not have a Call To Action. My site is not "Sales" written. I am actually looking for a good writer of product catalogs to improve this on my own website. I would love to know the general consensus to the question... At what level of website income is paying for SEO compliance worth your time and money?


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

Hi UN,

IMO (and this is not professional advice) you should approach it the same way you approach all other business expenses. If you invest x amount in the site you’ll expect a return for your money, but before you can do that (estimate the expected return) you need to qualify the investment, is this a long or short term investment? Is it a recurring expense? Is this brand building or a sales effort? Once we know that we can begin to assess whether a $ 2,000 investment in SEO is worth the trouble.

Assuming you think of this as a way to increase your sales, then, we now know that this is a recurring expense as search engines re-do all their algorithms every so often, I forget the time frame but let’s assume every six months. So, since SEO is a moving target you should get your return within that time frame. (Unless of course you have a much larger time horizon and are willing to invest for several years in order to become better known, but that would be a different type of investment, brand building as supposed to sales/returns.) In order for it to be a worthwhile investment you should at least recoup your investment (preferably more) in 6 months, if you have recurring sales then you could think of your profits as being delayed ‘charged’ if you will, to future sales, the important thing is that you at least got your money back and you are becoming better known. IMO unless you expect to get at least $ 340 back a month in extra sales, you may want to reconsider the expense. 

You make such a valid point here!  You can have a website that is completely optimized for the search engines, sending tons of traffic your way, yet if it is not usable, it won`t convert anyhow!  Usability is #1 in my books.  Before I will even optimize a website for a client I do a Usability Study for them and we incorporate all those changes first.  This may include enitcing sales copy that funnels your user down to the buy button or it may involve recreating your navigation to make is easier to find what your use is looking for. 

Search engines are all competitors and they want the best websites to show up in their users queries for their users.  They want the sites people love and enjoy using.  They want the best usable websites to be #1 so it stands to reason that if you build a usable website, that is easy to navigate with themed content that a user is looking for, you will rank at that top of the search engines eventually. 

Its only a bonus to optimize your title, redo meta-tags. clean up code plus some other SEO processes but the whole secret to SEO is making a usable website that the users love.  This will make the search engines love you too and rank you high!

UnwantedNews,

I am in the same boat.  My site has been up for a little over a week, but has generated $2.50 already.    Right now I am doing all the free SEO I can for myself.  Adding my URL to any search engine that will have me, checking search term hits and then crafting the content in my pages better.  Here is a pretty good link for determining good search terms:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156041

I have started dropping link bait also. 

Wikipedia also has a good article on SEO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seo

What I am not very clear on is how long it takes to start seeing results and how long to wait before determining that the current strategy might not be working.  Any information regarding that would be helpful.




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