Many clients ask me why they should invest in SEO since they can pay to appear first on Google through the AdWords platform. The answer is simple – one of them is a short-term, while the other is a long-term investment.

For instance, if you invest $30 to attract 200 more people to your website a day, you will be happy to have traffic from the very first day. So far, so good. However, if you stop the ad but you have not worked on the optimization, the traffic will drop from 200 to about 4-5 people a day. The idea of the optimization is to position your website well on the long run, to send information to Google in a proper and well-structured way, in line with the requirements and their protocol.

The investment in SEO should start from the very development of the website, as the SEO expert should tell the programmers what the structure of the addresses will be, what kind of titles and descriptions will appear and on what pages, which one will be automatically generated and which will be left for editing. When the work is in progress there will be frequent need of changing the code, and even the design of the website, so as to present the information in a correct and suitable for the search engines way.

Again, it is the SEO expert’s task to teach the team that maintains the website how to add content – frequency, amount, length, quality, and presence of concrete keywords.

Next comes the establishment of a network of clicks and registration in the search engines and directories, which takes months. My advice is to pay for SEO services every month in the first year after the start of your website or the launching of a new version. If you decide to command the SEO services from different providers once in a few months, you will achieve the effect of the antibiotics self-treatment – you start a course of treatment and then cut it before you are healed. When you feel that your sickness is aggravating, you start a new antibiotic but again decide to stop it because it does not bring fast results, and again you shift to a third antibiotic.

As a result, you are simply poisoning your organism without achieving the desired effect. The same harm will be caused to your website, if you fall into the trap of the offer to “make your website No 1 in Google for only $300”. Something that will not happen.

The concrete sum of the investment depends entirely on you possibilities but you should not be surprised if it turns out that the SEO expenses will cost more than those for the development of the website itself. This is a common case and it cannot be otherwise. It is normal to pay no less than $500 a month, as sometimes the investment may even increase to $2,000. It depends on the goals you have set yourself, the workload, the competition in the concrete segment, and many other factors.

The continuous investment in SEO will bear a long-term effect and aims at attracting a serious number of consumers to your website, no matter whether you pay for advertising or not. So, if you continue working following the above-mentioned example and if you want to attract not 200 but 2,000 visitors to your website through advertising, you will have to pay $500. If you want 20,000 visitors, you will have to pay $5,000. Things are different with the optimization – here you invest continuously without seeing the real effect, which will come later but will be so strong and lasting that your website will naturally attract thousands of visitors. Besides, these will be clearly targeted consumers, who are looking exactly for your products and services, and not only some traffic generated on the website.