The majority of web traffic is driven by four major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves. Not being found or not being indexed by these search engines puts your business at an incredible disadvantage. People all around the world, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, are searching for information, shopping, and buying. Search is the preferred method of navigating the Internet for many users. 
According to an iProspect Study, 35% of search marketers who participate in paid search advertising and outsourced their SEO to an search engine marketing firm recognized higher ROI than from paid search advertising.
Getting to the top of the search engines AND staying there can be quite a challenge and requires real work. There’s no magic pill or program out there that will do it for you overnight.
Sure, there will be some get-rich-quick software that might do it for you but you’ll soon find that it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Do it right the first time and the rest will be so much easier.
Think of a website as a brick-and-mortar store located on a quiet street. If you don’t market it aggressively, few will get to know your about your site and therefore no one will purchase anything meaning no profits. Like any business, a website requires investment of time, money, and effort to make it work.
The reality is, the hard part is not to get into the top 10 results; it’s to stay there. Competition is fierce at the top for some industries like web hosting, travel and loans.
SEO gives you SEVEN distinct advantages:
1. Lower cost of generating and capturing qualified leads.
These are qualified leads visiting your site because they have consciously searched for information using relevant keywords. This is especially true if they used specific search terms like “buy used chevy truck” instead of “chevy truck”. The first search term is very specific and indicates a ready-to-buy prospect and the latter being more generic and someone who’s likely still shopping around.
2. Cheaper “advertising” cost than traditional mediums as well as Paid Search.
SEO allows you to create a brand very cheaply (in most cases) for a significantly lower investment than traditional advertising like radio, TV, billboards, and yellow pages, ever will. In Doubleclick’s Performics 50 Search Trend Report, average PPC costs have increased 37% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006.
3. Increases credibility and visibility of your business.
While a large physical presence can be prohibitively expensive and not necessary for a small business, a listing in the top 10 search results increases the perception of credibility to a prospect seeking products and services you provide. It is just like having the biggest ads in the yellow pages helps you get more business as opposed to small line listings.
Online, you can be as small as a one-person business running everything from home doing business with a large fortune 100 corporation. Offline, having a professional office or large office with many employees may increase your credibility and ability to close a sale with a big client.
Anyone can throw up a website in a few hours and pay for clicks. Organic search results tend to be more credible and have higher click through rates than their pay-per-click counterparts.
4. No danger of pay-per-click fraud.
Because you aren’t paying for clicks to visit your site, there’ll never be any issues with an ad publisher using Adsense or something similar, artificially clicking to increase ad profits.
Unscrupulous competitors will also not be able to artificially inflate your advertising cost by clicking on your site to run up your ad budget.
5. Incredible rate of return for initial optimization work, especially in niche markets.
For niche markets, you’ll only have to do the work once and your site will stay in the top results for a very long time. And as the site ages, the value of that site increases and solidifies your value to visitors.
Even in competitive markets, a listing in the top 3 pages of SERPs garners more than 90% of the search traffic, revenue, and profits. If you are in competitive markets, larger companies will likely win the PPC listing wars. The top PPC advertising companies include eBay, NextTag, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo. With their financial might, they would use PPC as an branding medium in addition to generating sales leaving smaller advertisers in the dust. In time, PPC bid prices will significantly increase as the pattern in Fact #2 indicates.
6. Consider the eyetracking research done by MarketingSherpa, where
people’s eyes are skimming results so quickly that if they don’t see your one listing, you won’t get a second chance. Plus, not everyone reads and clicks on search results in the same way.
People skim the page using one of 5 ways depending on their education or where they are in the sales cycle: Quick Click, Linear Scan, Golden Triangle Scan, Deliberate Scan, or Pickup Search. Having multiple listings (paid and organic search listings) or main page organic search listing + indented organic search listing adds to your ability to achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).
7. In the other aspect of MarketingSherpa’s eyetracking research, they found searchers less likely to look at right column results compared to the left column. Their study indicates that up to 85% of searchers “tend to ignore the paid listings”. This finding is backed up by JupiterResearch’s 2005 Study which revealed that 87% of commercial clicks occur “on the natural (not sponsored) search results.” Not surprising, considering 66% of consumers “distrust” paid search ads (JupiterResearch 2003 Study).
The revealing study showed up in the eyetracking heatmap from a Google search.
The brightest areas were the hottest parts of page looked at. This weighs heavily in favor of achieving maximum visibility for your most important key phrases.
This research translated to what percentage of searchers looked at results in the top ten search engine results pages (SERPs).
Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%