• by July 30, 2004

My take on the matter is that most people, mid to upper-managers, find the ROI on PPC easier to understand. "I pay x for y listing and get z, which is greater than x. Good." This, versus, "I pay x for company or employee to make changes to my site and wait a few weeks, maybe more and then maybe I'll see a result."

Again, the problem is knowledge. Quality content designed with search engines in mind can drive hugely significant amounts of traffic, that will keep coming long after the search engine optimization is done. And, if your site has a good product with good content, your ROI will be amazing. If you were to put an annual value on the natural search engine traffic that my company receives, just in terms say the minimum bid on PPC, $5 cents, it would be well over $700,000 annually. For what? Implementing an SEO strategy with a setup cost of maybe $50,000 in labor and expenses, and an ongoing cost of maybe $20,000 yearly, mostly labor (monitoring and updating pages for SEO).

Can you say ROI? That seems to be the hard part, though: Communicating the VALUE of natural search optimization.