Is SEO Worth It in 2024?

In a world overflowing with marketing options, how do you make your business stand out? Paid ads, email campaigns, social media outreach… the choices are boundless. So it’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to find the perfect marketing mix.

One tactic that always sparks debate is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Contrary to quick-fix options like paid ads, SEO is a long-term game with high rewards.

In fact, recent studies suggest that:

SEO pays off big time. The average return on investment (ROI) for SEO ranges between 200% to 275%. This means for every $1 you spend, you can expect to earn back $2 to $2.75.

Marketers love SEO. Nearly half (49%) of all marketers say SEO offers the best return on their investment compared to other digital marketing channels.

If you are still unsure if SEO is worth it in 2024, this article will help you decide if it is needed for your business.

How Do I Know If SEO Services Are Worth it for My Business?

Several studies, over the years have noted that for most websites, their primary traffic comes from search engines like Google.

Even today, SEO  remains important and will do so for years to come. While technology and algorithms change, the core principles of SEO are timeless and can be easily adapted.

But the real question is, will investing in SEO services in 2024 offer returns proportionate to the amount you invest? To help you decide whether investing in SEO is a good idea or not, we have a list of a few questions. 

1. Are Your Customers Searching for Your Services or Products Online?

Assess Customer Search

To gauge “Is SEO worth it?” start evaluating whether your customers are searching online for the kind of products or services you offer. SEO can be a worthwhile investment if a significant portion of your target customer base is actively searching for your offerings online. 

It can also help you quantify the size of this potential market.

Ads Indicate Opportunity

The simplest way to validate your potential market in real-time is to enter the key phrases on search engines. If you see relevant ads for similar products or services, it is a strong sign that a market exists.

Role of SEO Tools

It is recommended that you leverage popular SEO tools like Ahref or SEMrush to check the monthly search volume for your keywords in your target market.

For example, let’s take the keyword ‘custom printed T-shirt.’ Its traffic potential in the USA is 100,000 searches per month. This indicates the presence of a robust online demand in this niche.

Therefore, evaluating the traffic potential relevant to specific keywords helps validate if there is an online market and substantial demand for your product/services.

However, high volumes also mean higher competition and this demands a nuanced, sometimes highly tactical approach. An SEO agency can help you streamline this process and enable you to penetrate the potential market.

2. Can You Wait for 8-12 Months to Start Seeing Some Results?

SEO is a long-term process that involves creating and optimising content and its technical aspects. Several ranking factors (200 in all), such as quality content, keyword optimization, user experience, backlinks, etc., can impact the ranking of your business’s website. Not to mention the technical SEO side of things.

Search engines use crawlers to discover and index website changes. This indexing process takes time, so updates may not reflect in search results right away. In their article Do You Need an SEO, Google clearly mentions that it will take four months to a year to see the results in real-time. 

If you are exclusively looking for immediate results, you must consider other marketing channels, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. 

However, if you demand sustainable growth in traffic over time, SEO could be the perfect choice. You can also ensure your brand’s authenticity and discoverability, which can set you apart from your competitors.

3. Do You Want to Reduce Your customer Acquisition Cost?

The best way to understand how SEO reduces your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is to compare it with paid advertising.

SEO vs. Paid Ads

If your business uses paid acquisition to drive traffic and sales, you would have observed that the CAC rises year-on-year. This is because paid ads are an auction-based system, and the more the bidders, the higher the cost of ads will eventually be.

A business cannot sustain itself with such incrementally higher customer acquisition costs.

Build Trust and Reduce Costs

SEO helps generate organic traffic from search engines. Once your website starts ranking for the right keywords, then the cost of maintenance is relatively lower than other channels like paid advertising that demand continuous spending.

Once you stop paying for online ads, the traffic stops as well. With SEO, if you have been consistent in your efforts, even if you lower your investments during your downtime, you can expect a steady flow of traffic.

Also, visitors trust websites that rank organically at the top of SERP than paid advertisements. So, SEO investments help drive down a significant share of CACs.

4. Do You Want to Build a Long-term Sustainable Online Business?

To manage costs, businesses frequently specialize in a single marketing channel. For example, e-commerce businesses typically focus on performance marketing (paid acquisition), while professional services prioritize referrals.

However, doing so puts you at risk if that channel doesn’t deliver or consumer behavior changes. It also impacts your resilience and weakens your business prospects.

Therefore, to build a sustainable online business in the long run, you must drive traffic and leads from multiple channels. For instance, complementing the performance marketing strategy with SEO helps an eCommerce business balance its marketing budgets and not depend solely on one channel.

Read here “12 Essential Questions to Ask SEO Agency Before You Hire Them“.

5 Benefits of SEO: How SEO Helps Your Business to Grow

SEO is one of the best marketing tactics that can add tremendous value to your business growth. Those who recognise the power of SEO are willing to invest more. For example,

80% of CMOs said they maintained or even increased their SEO budget in the year.

2023 Search Engine Land survey

Let us find out the key benefits of SEO for your business:

1. Earn Higher Revenue

From a business standpoint, ultimately, conversions matter. Increased traffic does not count unless it turns into sales. No matter how many channels you invest in, it narrows down to how many people are buying the products/services.

Conversion metrics indicate the revenue and return on your efforts and investments. SEO helps attract and drive targeted traffic from visitors who are actively searching for products or service offerings on search engines like Google. They are more likely to convert and become your loyal customers.

The average conversion rate via SEO is 2.4%, which is higher than that of most other channels. Furthermore, according to GitNux, marketers with mature SEO programs are more likely to see a revenue growth of 10% to 20%.

Investing in SEO isn’t just about improving traffic but conversion and business revenue as well.

2. Reduce Your CAC

With SEO, there is organic traffic, and it does not cost you every time a visitor comes to the website. This is unlike paid advertisements and other channels where you pay for each click.

When compared to other digital advertising, SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41%.

Terakeet

3. Reach Your Targeted Audience

SEO helps businesses optimise their websites and content to resonate with the intent of their target audience.

SEO can guide the production of ‘helpful’ content that resonates with targeted customer segments and aligns well with specific pain points. This significantly helps with conversions.

By aligning the content with the search intent, SEO helps businesses reach people who are actively exploring their products or services.

4. Get Higher Traffic

Currently, Google is visited 89.3 billion times a month, and the top 3 organic search results receive around 68.7% (two-thirds) of the clicks.

Optimizing your website to rank high on Google’s SERPs can attract enormous amounts of traffic.

5. Once You Rank, the Incremental Traffic Is Free

A major difference between SEO and other strategies like paid advertisements is that SEO pays off even after you pause it or significantly cut down the investment. In contrast, the moment you stop paying for Google Ads, the traffic stops.

Though SEO requires initial investments in generating content and thoroughly optimizing the website, you can receive incremental, organic traffic from search engines without additional costs.

6. Build a Cost-Effective Remarketing Audience for Paid Campaigns

SEO can complement your paid acquisition efforts and help you run laser-focused campaigns. The organic visitors have already demonstrated their interest in your products and services.

Website traffic generated from SEO efforts can help create remarketing lists. Targeting them with remarketing ads means marketing your offerings to a highly qualified audience.

SEO-driven web traffic can also be a source for creating look-alike audiences for paid campaigns. This means companies market their products not only to people who visited their site via SEO but also to a similar audience that might be interested in your products/services. This helps avoid wasting money on a broad audience.

7. Build a Competitive Moat

With high-quality content, relevant backlinks, and an adjusted website structure, businesses can exercise authority in the industry. It helps improve search engine rankings for relevant queries.

When customers consistently find your business at the top of search engines, they tend to trust you more and prefer to buy from you over your competitors.

Also, as SEO demands consistent and long-term efforts, your competitors may find it difficult to duplicate the specific strategy.

Read here “How To Hire a Link Building Agency“.

SEO Case Studies: Real Examples Where SEO is a Game Changer for Business

Zestard Technologies is an award-winning digital marketing company with over 10 years of experience.

Zestard brings several benefits to the table, including proven SEO strategies that deliver effective and long-term results to keep your website constantly ranking at the top position in the SERP.

We have also successfully managed and executed complex projects for global brands. Here are a few notable case studies for your reference.

(i) 10x Organic Traffic in 24 Months for A Medical Device Website

Zestard helped a US-based medical devices company that was involved in manufacturing Automated External Defibrillators (AED). It helps treat cardiac arrests and restore normal functioning. When they approached us, the website was new, and the client wanted to create an awareness of their brand before they launched the AEDs.

The Zestard team conducted an elaborate SEO audit and identified the numerous technical and non-technical issues, including the 301 redirect chain, canonical errors, issues with the subdomain’s Robot’s.txt file, limited internal linking, etc.

Based on our findings, we developed a four-step content and internal linking strategy to boost the rankings. The website witnessed 10x organic traffic in just 24 months.

(ii) 6x Organic Traffic Growth for a US Healthcare Company

Zestard worked with a US-based healthcare company that had difficulties in generating website traffic and building an authoritative online presence. The team identified several issues during the SEO audit. Blog pages were blocked from Google for indexing due to the incorrect implementation of canonical tags. Meta titles were not properly structured, and critical pages had no-follow / no-index tags.

Our team performed extensive keyword research and on-page optimisation. They also upscaled the existing content. We worked on 120+ blog articles that they already had with keyword targeting and rewriting strategies.

Once the results started showing, we also helped them generate fresh content and build relevant backlinks. The website saw a 6-times growth in organic traffic in just 15 months.

(iii) 3x Organic Traffic in 4 Months for An Ecommerce Website

We worked with an eCommerce company that sold electrical components and automation spares. It was a brand-new website and had several issues, from duplicate homepage URLs and pages to broken internal links and index bloat. The team categorised the issues and started working on the high-priority ones.

Our team focused on removing duplicate content and URLs, fixing broken internal links, creating meta titles, adding meta descriptions, and so on. The team also performed exhaustive keyword research and optimised the content accordingly. The results – A 3x jump in traffic within 4 months!

So, Is SEO Worth for You?

The answer is a striking yes!

SEO is the most sustainable option when it comes to generating traffic in the long run. Also, as SEO strategies target people who have already shown interest in your products or services, they are more likely to convert.

SEO results in relatively lower customer acquisition costs and higher click-through rates. When your websites start ranking at the top of search engines, visitors tend to trust your site more.

Though paid ads and other strategies generate immediate results, they are short-term. SEO is critical for long-run, and sustained traffic.

SEO is definitely worth it in 2024!

FAQs

1. Is SEO complicated?

Yes! SEO requires a comprehensive understanding of search engine algorithms, ranking factors, tools, etc. SEO practices keep evolving, so continuous learning and adaptation are required. It also involves technical elements like website structure, HTML coding, schema markup, etc. Fixing your website for these technical aspects requires sound expertise. All these make SEO a complicated task.

2. Why is SEO expensive?

SEO is not always expensive. It does not follow a one-fits-all approach and upfront costing. However, the actual cost depends on several factors, including:

• Number of pages to be optimised on the website
• Amount of new content that needs to be created
• Link-building strategies
• Existing technical SEO issues
• Intensity of competition in the industry
• Your current search engine rank

3. How long will it take to see the rewards of SEO?

The time taken to see the rewards of SEO depends on various factors, like the current state of your website, competition in your industry, and the consistency of the SEO efforts. While you may witness initial traction in the first 3 months, significant results usually take 6 to 12 months.

4. Which is the best SEO outsourcing company?

Zestard Technologies is one of the best SEO outsourcing companies. It follows a proven, step-by-step approach to improving your ranking, to drive more traffic and increase your revenue. The SEO professionals stay abreast of the latest developments and fine-tune their strategies accordingly. Zestard Technologies has worked with businesses in several countries, including the USA, India, the UK, and so on.

Get in touch to learn more about Zestard’s Organic SEO services.

Discover the best link building companies in 2024!

5. When should I start SEO for my business?

The appropriate time to start SEO for any business is right away. SEO takes time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you see the results.

Whether you are an established business or a brand new company, investing in SEO helps improve your search engine rankings, create an awareness of your business, drive more traffic to your website, and improve sales revenue.

6. Is SEO profitable for small businesses in 2024?

The resounding answer is yes. Perhaps SEO is a great opportunity for small businesses to compete with corporations and established enterprises. When compared to other marketing channels, SEO is a cost-effective platform to target and generate relevant organic traffic to your website.

If you want your SEO requirements addressed by expert professionals, get in touch with us today!