Why Search Engine Optimization is NOT Cheap - the Truth about SEO

A lot of people are surprised to find out that real Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be rather expensive, especially since there are so many websites promising top rankings for a very cheap price.

But WHY is SEO expensive? Let’s take a look at the big picture.

Google’s most important (internal) requirement, like with EVERY company, is to be profitable. If you don’t make money, you go out of business.

How does Google make money? Mostly through advertising revenues. Google Adwords generates an insane amount of money for Google.

How does advertising make money? Google gets paid to show sponsored messages to it’s audience.

This means that the bigger the audience, the more opportunity to generate advertising revenues. In Google’s case, this is mostly through the use of their search engine.

So, in order to have the largest audience for their search engine, Google must return the best and most appropriate search results to it’s searchers.

This is Google’s most important (external) job. To provide the best search results. In other words, to help people find what they are looking for, better than any other search engine does. 

When you do a Google search, you are rewarded with a results page, which contains 10, and only 10, organic search results or listings. 

Yes, there can be Adwords ads, and possibly Places listings too, but the most important point is that there are only 10 organic listings.

These are the ones everyone shoots for with SEO. This is the end of the rainbow, where the pot of gold lies for many companies.

Currently there are almost 380 Million websites on the Internet, and roughly 55 Billion web pages, almost all of them looking to be on page 1 of Google for one or more search terms.

That’s a lot of competition.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a web designer in Calgary. Your main search term to be found may be “Calgary Web Designer”.

When we do a search for “Calgary Web Designer” and look at the page 1 results, Google tells us right at the top of the page, that there are “About 2,160,000 results”.

So we’re competing with over 2 million pages.

The Yellow Pages online directory has about 140 web design companies listed in Calgary, so it would be safe to say that there are at least 300 web designers in Calgary, including all the work-from-home guys.

So we’re realistically competing with 300+ other businesses to be on page 1. This is not even taking into account any companies outside of Calgary who do service the area.

300 websites competing for the only 10 spots on page 1 of Google. So there have to be 290 losers.

Now, I’ve seen claims of guaranteed page 1 rankings for $99, and even guaranteed #1 ranking on Google.

If these claims were true, then it would be easy. Just pay $99 and get on page 1. However, when 300 companies pay $99 to different SEO providers to be on page 1, we’re back to the original problem. There are only 10 spots on page 1.

Remember what Google’s main job is: to provide the most relevant search results to the searcher. Google doesn’t care about you, or where you think you should, or where you want to rank. It’s about the searcher.

So we have 300 companies feverishly generating good content that Google will like, and obtaining high quality links that try to convince Google that each website is important.

But we’re STILL sitting with the same problem. 300 websites competing for 10 spots.

Of course, all 300 are competing to some degree, but not to the same degree. The websites that get the highest ranking, do the most work and/or pay the most for SEO.

For any given keyword, the effort and cost to rank highly, is directly proportional to the competition for that keyword, and how deep the pockets are of those ranking the highest.

If you’re a local business, getting to page 1 may not be too complicated or expensive. If you have less than 10 competitors, then it may even be easy and cheap(er).

However, if you have more than 10 competitors, you will have to invest more in SEO than the current holder of the 10th ranking.

You cannot win a race by starting last and trying less hard than those in front of you.

The same competition sets prices for Pay-Per-Click ads, and other media. If there is limited space, the higher budgets will displace the lower ones.

For many companies, the Internet is no longer even a viable marketing medium. If you sell something Amazon sells, and has sold for 10 years, it is highly unlikely, no matter how much money you have, that you will ever out-rank Amazon and their long-term affiliates.

If you sell books that Amazon sells, you have even less of a chance, because Amazon is selling books at a LOSS. Books have become their loss leader in order to sell TV’s and make a better profit on electronics.

The bottom line is that you should be wary of outlandish claims, and do your homework.

Sometimes we are tempted to go for the cheap magic pill in the hopes that it will work, but in SEO, if it’s not done correctly, it could actually HURT your ranking.