SEO increases visibility, attracts organic traffic, and boosts long-term growth through higher ranking and more sales.
Ieva Treiliha
Entrepreneurs are often skeptical about search engine optimization (SEO) when it comes to allocating the marketing budget.
They ask: “Is SEO actually worth it?” – and I completely understand why this question comes up.
SEO is about trust. SEO takes time. SEO is a long-term investment. The time frame to see a return on your SEO investment is relatively long, making it challenging for business owners to see the value of investing in SEO.
I am often asked whether SEO is worth it. The question of whether you should devote a significant part of your marketing budget to SEO has many sides. I’ll do my best to answer that in the following sections. Read on to see if SEO is an investment your company should have on its agenda in the near future.
Unlike paid advertising, it’s not as easy to show concrete results from SEO, and it’s even harder to illustrate outcomes that may be expected after a certain period. There are no clear dashboards in SEO showing daily spend related to sales or conversions. This can sometimes tempt you to believe that SEO is too expensive to invest in.
First, it’s important to understand what an “SEO investment” means from start to finish. An investment of DKK 20,000 per month in SEO is often seen as an investment in an agency or consultant, but it’s much more than that. SEO means work on every part of your website to make it optimized for search engines and attractive to customers.
It includes work on landing pages and content, information architecture, technical improvements, and more. Your SEO results depend on the products or services you offer, which keywords you want to rank for and where, what your website looks like, how user-friendly and fast it is, how much content you have, and much more.
So, SEO is built on many different resources and outcomes.
You can’t compare SEO investments with paid advertising. That’s why it can be hard to measure ROI (Return On Investment) from SEO—it requires seeing the bigger perspective. The investment and return timeline in SEO looks completely different from paid channels.
That doesn’t mean SEO is a bad investment—quite the opposite. But it’s important to understand how much work is really required. SEO costs money, but it does because it involves many different tasks that together lead to long-term results.
SEO is expensive—but at the same time, it contributes to substantial revenue.
How do you succeed with paid advertising? Simply put—the more you invest in paid channels, the easier it is to see results. The more you’re willing to pay per click on competitive keywords, the more visible you become. This doesn’t underestimate the work needed for Google Ads or paid social, which also involves analysis, ad creation, campaign management, bid adjustments, and more. But in SEO, you rarely become visible faster just by spending more money.
How do you then succeed with SEO? You need to activate even more processes and resources—both internally and externally. To understand the actual costs of SEO, you need to know what it takes to succeed.
One reason companies down-prioritize SEO is often that they feel they lack internal resources for the work. It’s not always a conscious decision to deprioritize SEO but often a deliberate choice to focus elsewhere.
Paid advertising is often outsourced, while many prefer to insource SEO. Larger companies may have dedicated SEO teams, but most small and midsize companies do not—making SEO outsourcing the right choice.
If you outsource SEO, your company gets access to more internal resources for other tasks. You save costs for recruiting and training an SEO specialist. Outsourcing gives you access to specialists with expertise and broad experience, ready to tackle various SEO challenges.
Insourcing also has advantages: you are not limited by a fixed number of SEO hours per month and can work faster with content and on-page. Internal specialists often know your products and business better.
Many small and midsize businesses choose a hybrid: a marketer handles some SEO tasks internally, while there is an agreement with an external agency or consultant for guidance and support.
SEO covers three important areas, and a good specialist needs to master them all.
Being able to work across all three areas is crucial when choosing between in- and outsourcing—it can be hard to find one person skilled in all three, but at an agency there are often experts for each area.
As mentioned, paid advertising requires analysis, strategy, campaign setup, and creative productions. The largest cost is usually the ad budget itself, but don’t underestimate all the extra work needed for success.
SEO doesn’t have the same direct media expenses. Instead, the budget goes to strategy, keyword and market analysis, and ongoing work with on-page, off-page, technical, monitoring, and communication.
Strategy and analysis generally take less of the budget; ongoing optimization, however, requires significant resources—either in hours or outsourced costs.
Examples include copywriting, link building, outreach and analysis, structured data, speed optimization, and all site meta tags.
SEO work can be complex, costly, and slow—especially for companies that aren’t used to producing lots of content, landing pages, or links.
It’s hard to calculate the exact ROI of SEO and thus the exact cost. Work is often done together by internal and external teams, making it harder to pinpoint cost.
Many agencies give a simplified picture of costs, but reality is much more nuanced with ongoing incremental conversions. In summary, SEO provides strong ROI—it’s about seeing the whole.
What results can you expect from SEO?
Simply put, it means better Google rankings, increased visibility, more organic traffic, and thus higher revenue.
These are the two main KPIs we use to measure SEO.
There are also so-called “soft” KPIs for measuring SEO results:
All KPIs measure the impact and outcome of SEO.
Want to boost your revenue with SEO? Then you need to know about this analysis method.
SEO not only improves organic traffic and rankings. Optimized SEO enhances the entire user experience. You become visible to more potential customers with optimized pages, and the conversion rate increases on a fast, user-friendly website.
SEO also gives better results in other channels. With optimized landing pages, you get higher Ad Rank in Google Ads and better click prices. Read more here: How to get lower click prices in Google Ads and 6 things you need to know about Google Ads.
In paid social, you also increase conversions if you lead visitors to effective, optimized landing pages.
SEO truly never ends. There will always be new relevant keywords, new content, and technical improvements to implement. To scale SEO, focus on four factors:
You need clear SEO goals. Do you want more traffic? Increased sales? More visibility? If you have specific keywords—which and how many do you want to rank for?
You also need to know what you want to achieve in order to create a strategy and align expectations with your team or agency.
SEO is costly, and returns come over time. Building authority takes time; it doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, and don’t give up even if results take a while. You must trust the process.
Focused work in all SEO areas and adapting your strategy to Google’s latest requirements gives visible results and helps you scale up.
Focus on quick wins. Once these opportunities have been utilized, it becomes easier to scale and set bigger SEO goals.
Feel free to outsource time-consuming or complex tasks—it saves time and internal resources. Common areas to outsource are copywriting, translation, and development, but with strong partners you can outsource more as needed.
Investing in SEO is like buying a house instead of renting an apartment. It costs more, but the results are long-lasting and don’t disappear immediately when you stop the investment. The benefits accumulate and increase as your website continues to be optimized.
You’re not just investing in better rankings and traffic, but also in user experience and overall site quality. With SEO, you ensure customers find your most important products and information on the landing page. And you increase your chances of meeting Google’s content, performance, and usability requirements.
Yes, SEO can cost more than Google Ads or Social, but you also improve your site as a whole.
The value SEO generates doesn’t disappear right away as advertising does when you turn it off. It takes time to build up expertise, authority, and trust—but it also takes time to lose if you pause SEO.
Even though SEO is a costly and long-term investment, it’s definitely worth it. Contact us here to get started with SEO today!
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