The Business Value Blog

SEO ROI may be the largest single indicator of your company’s future success as businesses learn to harness the power of the internet and ecommerce. SEO, search engine optimization, represents your web sites ability to get put into the prime real estate on the internet the first page is the best neighborhood, the second page is okay, and everything after is the slums. In French, “Roi” means “king,” and in business terms ROI really is king because it stands for the “return on investment.”

SEO Holy Grail

The Holy Grail of all SEO efforts is the top of the three main search engines. The best house in the best neighborhood when it comes to search engines is the top listing on the page that is not an advertisement. Just because you don’t pay directly for this real estate, doesn’t mean that you don’t pay for it in other ways. Your SEO efforts are what are going to get you to the top of the page, and you have got to pay someone to do that. You cannot create a web site with an ecommerce aspect and hope that people will stumble upon it. Well, you can, but then it won’t be very successful, and all of the money that you spent on design and development will have a poor ROI

ROI Excalibur

If SEO is the Holy Grail, then ROI is Excalibur. Your ROI is how you win the battle for profit margin supremacy. If you invest a dollar and you get ten dollars back, that is an amazing ROI, and that is what you want from any investment, but especially from your web investment. In order to claim that kind of return, you need to understand how search engines work, or you need to hire someone who does. Here’s the kicker. Search engines continuously change the way that they change how web sites are found. So, how do you take advantage of search engines for the best possible ROI?

The Search for the Holy Grail with Excalibur

There are some who say that the Holy Grail never rested in one place. Indeed, if you are familiar with Knights of the Round Table and their search for the Cup of Christ, you know that the Grail revealed itself to a lucky few, who were then dissuaded from further searching. Only one knight was able to attain the actual Grail. SEO is much the same in that the constant tweaking that search engines do in an effort to improve their efficacy and to thwart those web designers with impure intent creates a roaming target for web masters to hit. For the best SEO ROI, you need to find someone who has the time to research and understand what search engines are doing and how that affects the organization of the returned answers to search queries. Without SEO, you are wasting the money that you put into getting a presence on the internet, even if it is a side project of your PR department.