Unless you want to make money online you don’t need SEO . SEO is one part of the online strategy to getting customers, leads and making more business. If a website is sitting in the search engines listings on page 1,000,000  or even page 10 on goggle search, and no one can find it, then the website is really not doing its’ job and it probably was a waste of money in the first place.

There are 3 ways to get people to a website to generate leads and purchases:

1. Place adverts offline and some people will visit the website (hopefully the website has been tested for conversion at that point).
2. Place adverts and banners all over the internet where people see them to visit the website
3. Get people from free searches on the search engine, which is often referred to as “free traffic”.

For serious marketers and companies, they use all the above to some extent or another, depending on their industry. Very advanced marketers and companies also use social media in the mix to some extend or another.

However, the fact is that in the long term of continually getting people to a website is still via the search engines. There is no advert that you can pay for it once and will get you people forever not even for a long period of time, only for the time that it is advertised.

Every advert that one places, online of offline, costs money, however, once the strength in the search engine has been achieved for rankings on the first page of Google, it is much easier and cheaper to maintain in the long term.
With SEO one can achieve long terms visitors to a website, without paying for adverts over and over again. SEO is combined of many tasks that need to be preformed to achieve the goals. It does take some work, but once there, the work reduces significantly with time (unless you are in a space where there is fierce competition and a new site with dedicated SEO people pops up every single day, which is not very common in most industries).

SEO is not magic, it takes work and time and it pays big dividends for those that understand SEO and perform this job daily or outsource it to get the free traffic.

So is SEO important? Sure it is if you want to get more clients, more leads through the website and if you have the long terms vision of the internet. It is not only the vision of how many people you can get today, which is part of the whole picture, but how many more clients and leads you can get for as long as the business is in existence. The internet is NOT getting smaller, it is getting BIGGER, much bigger each year and South Africa is only at the beginning.

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