Businesses are continuously having to cut costs in an ever tight economical environment and all of the marketing and advertising they do has to almost guarantee a result and return on that investment. That marketing needs to grow the business without the long-term marketing costs increasing. Business owners want profits and, in order to be (stay) profitable, expenses need to be kept at a minimum in every area. Even marketing.

Unfortunately, an advertisement in a paper is a tangible object. Chicago SEO is not. Instead of looking at SEO as an investment, since it is an intangible service, most business owners don't want to pay a lot of money to have their website optimized. But, let's look as some statistics and companies.  

Coca-cola.

Walmart.

JCPenney

Pepsi.

You know of them right? Because they've never stopped advertising. They've never quit their SEO and SMM efforts because the saying goes...out of sight, out of mind. And it's true! You think if Coca-Cola stopped advertising and Pepsi took advantage of it that Coke would survive? Perhaps for a while, due to loyal customers, but what about new customers? Pepsi would win out in the end.

We often talk to business owners that want to invest temporarily in SEO or Social Media Marketing, and just do it until it starts working and then taper off or eliminate it later. Like I said before, if Coke stopped advertising and Pepsi didn't...who gets the new client? Pepsi. 

If you STOP your SEO efforts...your rankings will fall, your traffic will fall and the people who didn't stop WILL take your high ranking from you.

Long Term vs. Short Term
There are techniques that can be done to your website that only need to be done once before moving on such as url structure, image renaming images, alt tags, meta data and general content. But the external process is a perpetual researching of keywords, adding blog posts and continuously making a website more search engine friendly and keyword focused.

When consulting with your SEO Company, get out of the mindset that this is an expense. Look at the return on your investment that a strategic SEO campaign will bring. You'll come to the realization that cutting SEO out of the budget is ultimately cutting into your costs.

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