Plug in SEO blog
25Mar/102

Why investing in SEO is worthwhile

We often hear from our customers that they've been struggling to find time to invest in improving their search rankings - though those same people are often happily spending both time and money on paid ad campaigns. Here's some data showing you why you should be investing at least as much in your organic rankings as in paid search.


You probably already know that users click more on organic search results than on paid ads – in 2008 Google’s Avinash Kaushik said that just 14% of Google clicks come from paid search, whereas 86% of clicks are organic.

As shown in this graphic, a survey of US marketers reports that around 3 times as much web traffic results from organic search listings as from PPC ads.


Another report shows that although investment in PPC is likely to decrease in 2010, it’s still pretty close to the amount that’s being invested in organic search (11% of lead-generation budgets is planned on paid in 2010 compared to 13% on SEO). So, for roughly the same investment, sites are generating three times as much traffic from organic search as on paid ads!

And search marketers agree that investing in SEO makes sense. 64% of those who were able to calculate and compare their ROI on both SEO and paid campaigns said that SEO produces a higher ROI than paid ads (and another 16% say the two are similar) [1].
Paid ads campaigns do have the advantage of being easy to set up - you can put a Google Ad up in a few minutes and see the effect in minutes or hours, whereas SEO can take more effort and has a longer term pay-back. The flip-side is that if you stop paying for a PPC ad campaign, all web traffic from that campaign ceases immediately. Conversely, SEO is persistent - the investment you make is likely to help your natural search results indefinitely.
Here at Plug in SEO we recognise that it can be hard to measure the payback from your SEO investment. We've got some exciting features in the pipeline that will help, and make it even more obvious why you should be spending your valuable time on organic rankings as well as on paid campaigns.

[1] This iProspect study cites a Jupiter Research survey of search marketers from 2007. We have excluded the 43% who were unable to calculate ROI.
10Dec/090

Thanks to all our beta testers

Today's a big day for Plug in SEO. We have just emailed all our wonderful beta testers, so that they are the first to know about our new pricing plan.

We've done our best to come up with a plan that's fair to our users, whether they are just starting out with a brand new website, or have an established site with many thousands of visitors. Here's what we're doing:

Firstly, you'll only pay if your traffic increases. The whole point of SEO is to drive more traffic to your site, so we have to help you do that - and if we're not, it's only fair if we don't charge you.

Secondly, you'll pay according to the amount of traffic to your site. And if you have less than 1000 visits in a month, we won't charge you anything at all.

Finally, every user gets 30 days free usage to try out the product and see if it suits their needs.

In all, this is a no risk pricing plan for our users. As always, we invite your feedback.

We'd once again like to thank all our beta testers, who have generously shared their experiences and feedback over the last few months. We wouldn't be here without you.