Cost-effective Customer Acquisition:
There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume, low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (e.g. ‘car insurance’).
Fixed Costs:
The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimization costs and lower ongoing optimization costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.
Brand Visibility:
Think about that search on ‘car insurance’. The big insurance companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it either need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.
Customer Acquisition :
Targeted Prospects: Search is demand-driven, so anybody referred from a search engine is hoping that your web page matches their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to see, they may well become your next customer.
Focus on Web Standards / Accessibility:
Designing a website for search is an exercise in designing a best practice website. Search engine crawlers notice errors in your code, so valid code is a must for SEO.
Repeat Business:
Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!
Focus on Unique Content:
We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorize and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy.
Credibility / Brand Perception:
“Why aren’t you in Google for ‘car insurance’”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?
Findability:
Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product review, a person etc.