Some of my Customers ask frequently this question. After all SEO is an expensive proposition. So should you do SEO or not?
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that you have a nice website and you want to generate revenues from it. To answer the question in the headline I am making a comparison with financial investments: never put all your eggs in the same basket. If the basket gets stolen, broken etc. you are going to lose everything. If you, however, diversify your investments, you are not likely to go broke . With the Internet is the same.
Traffic on a website comes from different sources:
A sane (and safe) website should always get traffic from a mix of sources.
Some of this traffic can be free (or so) some can be pretty expensive. SEO tends to provide long lasting results, although slow and expensive to implement. Pay per Click is usually fast to implement and very expensive, but the traffic generated is usually well targeted; this means customers ready to buy.
So why should you diversify? Since the majority of these sources are completely out of your control, without diversification, you risk to be subject to the “mood” of these sources. Let’s say that you are the 3rd results on Google for one of your important keywords. If Google decides to change its algorithms (how Google decides your positioning), and they do this frequently, you might jump to 1st place as well to the 200th place. The latter would be a big negative hit on your revenues. BUT if your traffic due to natural positioning accounts for only 25% of the total, you won’t go completely broke.
So, please, from now on, try to diversify your marketing strategy and you will be grateful you did.