The Residual Benefits Of SEO

What is SEO?
If you're reading this, you probably already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You can probably just skip this paragraph if that's the case. For the rest of you, it basically means that you're helping your site show up higher in search engine rankings. This has a pretty obvious positive effect on how well your site for selling (or promoting, etc.) whatever you do performs. People click from the top to the bottom and the higher your site is, the more qualified traffic you get. The more qualified traffic you get, the more purchases (or people you reach, etc.) your site gets you. Anyway, you can see where the benefit comes in.

Getting people to your site
SEO is only one of many ways to get people to your site. It is the absolute best way to get what is referred to as "organic" traffic. This refers to people who find your site by doing a search in a popular search engine such as Google or Yahoo and click on your link as it comes up as a search result (rather than an ad you're paying for through a pay-per-click program like Google's AdWords). As mentioned previously, the better ranking (or the sooner that people see your site after doing a search for a relevant term) your site is, the more clicks you'll get and the more people see your page.

How does SEO differ from other traffic-driving-sources?
Search Engine Optimization offers residual benefits that no other form of driving traffic can. Pay-per-click programs, such as AdWords, will give you almost immediate results and, when well-optimized, can provide a high ROI. Similar results follow a strong CSE (Comparison Shopping Engine) campaign. However, in the long run, SEO will offer a much higher ROI. Though it may take months to get a site optimized (even more for very competitive keyword searches), in the end, the SEO work you put into your site will produce much better results.

How SEO is residual
One of the greatest benefits of investing in good SEO work is that the traffic is residual. How?

1. Rather than paying every time someone comes, you get "free" traffic after your initial SEO optimization.
2. Once your site gets big, other sites start linking to you, increasing traffic from those sites and also assisting your SEO profile.
3. SEO has a trickle-down effect. For example, a retail site's main page is SEO optimized and has a pagerank (Google's ranking tool) of 7 out of 10. As new products get added and cross-linked within the site, they get indexed and ranked far faster than if we created a new site and added products to it.

In short, SEO gives residual benefits that no other form of advertising can bring to your site and is an investment that any online retailer should take seriously if they want long term results from their site.

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