Search Engine Optimization in 2006: Cost and Payoff

Search engine optimization in 2006 is no longer a fringe tactic reserved for tech companies. Google has become the default starting point for anyone researching a purchase, and where a business lands on that first page of results has a direct effect on the phone ringing or the contact form filling up. The question most owners are asking isn’t “what is SEO,” it’s “should I spend money and time on this right now, or is it a distraction.”

This is meant as a straight answer to that question, not a sales pitch.

What you’re buying

SEO is not advertising. You aren’t renting attention the way you do with a newspaper ad or a pay-per-click campaign on Google AdWords. You’re changing how your website is built and written so that Google’s crawlers can understand what the page is about and judge it worth showing to someone searching for it. That judgment rests mostly on two things: what’s on the page (titles, headings, the actual words a visitor reads) and what other sites say about you (links pointing back to your site, which Google still treats as a vote of confidence through its PageRank system).

The upside is durability. A newspaper ad stops working the day it stops running. A page that ranks well can keep bringing in visitors for months or years without another dollar spent, provided nobody outranks you.

Who benefits fastest

Businesses with a clear, searchable need benefit first: a plumber, a divorce attorney, a specialty retailer, a B2B software vendor with a defined niche. If people already type queries related to what you sell into Google, SEO has something to work with immediately.

Businesses selling something nobody is actively searching for yet, a brand-new category of product, have a harder road. SEO answers demand; it doesn’t create it. If that’s your situation, your marketing dollars are probably better spent elsewhere until demand exists.

The real cost

Expect to pay in one of two currencies: cash for an agency or consultant, or time if you or someone on staff learns to do it yourself. Either way, results take months, not days. Google needs to crawl your changes, index them and then re-rank you against competitors who are also making changes. Anyone promising a first-page ranking within a week is either lying or planning to use tactics, hidden text, link farms, keyword stuffing, that put your site at risk of being penalized or removed from Google’s index entirely.

A simple readiness check

Before committing budget, ask three questions:

1. Do people search for what I sell? Check Google’s own keyword suggestions or a tool like Overture’s keyword tool to see actual search volume.
2. Is my website built on something Google can read? Sites built entirely in Flash, with no real text content, give search engines almost nothing to index.
3. Can I commit to at least six months before judging results? SEO rewards patience and punishes businesses that quit after one disappointing month.

If you answered yes to all three, SEO deserves a place in your marketing budget. If not, fix the gap first.

Where the money should go first

For most small and mid-sized businesses in 2006, the highest-return first steps are unglamorous: write real, specific page titles and descriptions instead of “Home” and “Welcome to our website,” make sure every page has actual paragraph text a person and a crawler can read and start earning links the honest way by getting listed in relevant industry directories and getting mentioned by other sites in your niche. Paid link schemes and mass directory submissions look tempting but increasingly draw Google’s scrutiny.

The honest tradeoff

SEO won’t replace a strong offer or a business people are happy to recommend. What it does is make sure the customers already looking for you can find you instead of finding a competitor who bothered to fix their title tags. For a business with a real audience searching Google right now, that’s worth the wait.