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I agree, with the exception that you should never view organic traffic as free. Even if you didn't spend any money on SEO directly(e.g. buying links) SEO can be
by il 16y ago
I agree, with the exception that you should never view organic traffic as free. Even if you didn't spend any money on SEO directly(e.g. buying links) SEO can be very time consuming, and you should always consider the opportunity cost of time spent on SEO versus other traffic sources.
I pay my outsourced employees who do SEO for me by the hour, so maybe I feel the financial pinch of a large scale SEO campaign more than others, but any time spent on SEO by anyone in your startup is money.
- patio11 16y agoThis is a good point. I was trying to talk about unit economics: a customer from organic SEO is free at the margin, and if you're not able to monetize them profitably with a marginal cost of 0 then it is strikingly unlikely you will be able to buy them on AdWords and make up the loss on volume.
- il 16y agoThat's generally true, but in some cases, particularly in certain niches, that argument breaks down. In the past several years I've staked significant money(6 figures) on my ability to predict traffic quality(how well a traffic source converts) and you may find that the people who click on ads(sometimes before clicking on any search results) convert much better than SEO traffic. I've seen 50-150% difference in conversion rate between targeted free and paid traffic several times. This is why many companies bid on their name in their SEM campaigns, even though they obviously easily rank first for it organically. This isn't necessarily always true, but it's something to think about.