Is SEO An Expense Or An Investment?

You often hear people state that SEO is a costly exercise. It can be but then it often depends at what stage of a site’s life cycle an SEO consultant is brought in. If they come in right at the start, the cost can be fairly low. If they come in two or three years down the road, the cost can be quite high. So is it an expense or an investment?

If you take on board an SEO consultant when first designing a new site, there is no two ways about it, the cost is an investment. Every penny that goes into building your site is spent with the ultimate aim of increasing your business. Increased business and increased sales can be measured and you will be able to determine the return on that investment.

When an SEO consultant is brought in down the track, there is often a lot of cleaning up to be done, perhaps some reversing of some aspects of the site and a lot of backtracking. Is this an expense or an investment? It should result in an increase in sales, however, it can be hard to measure. The reason for this is simple – an SEO consultant doesn’t just clean up a site, they are also going forward with the site, building links and developing keywords with relevant pages. This may involve a new site design, or at the very least, a change in internal link patterns and the rewriting of some content to make it more ‘keyword’ friendly.

SEO should always be considered an investment. The aim is to increase your presence on the web and so to drive targeted traffic to your site. This does not always equate to ‘more’ traffic, however, the traffic you receive should be targeted and result in much lower bounce rates.

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