I got a featured article in my email the other day from [1] Web Reunited. Normally I don’t put down other peoples’ articles, but this one I will make an exception for simply because I’m seeing more and more of these types of articles popping up.

In the jist the article basically protests the whole SEO practice. It’s point in case is that search engine traffic doesn’t convert as well as link partner traffic and is a waste of time considering how much effort goes into it. I have to agree with Gary on a few points. SEO is hard work and doesn’t pay off for everyone. I won’t bother arguing whether or not search engine traffic converts better, because one quick look at his site will show you 2,000+ links on an automated link directory script and only 53 people signed his petition. The point is already made for me.

My point is simple and I don’t intend to pick on Gary’s particular article. There’s plenty of these type of articles out there urging people to quit trying to optimize their site for search engines because it’s not worth the investment, whether that investment be time or money.

DON’T LISTEN TO THESE ARTICLES! They are not written by marketing experts. The people writing these articles will never receive job offers from Sony to join their marketing team. Why? Because marketing is based off of an extremely simple concept. It doesn’t matter what your return on investment is with your marketing efforts as long as it is profitable.

When I first started my brick n mortar business a lady from the local radio station came in to have a meeting with me. She asked me how I currently advertise. I told her my primary way was flyers in the newspaper. She wanted to know how much I spent on my ads, and I let her know it was $X,XXX /per ad. She wanted to know my return, and I pulled my figures and said $XX,XXX/per ad. She was shocked. She told me that if I quit advertising with the newspaper ad and switched to radio I could run an ad for a whole month for the same money and since radio has such great demographics I could make a larger return on my advertising investment.

This essentially is the same thing these people are trying to sell you. Sounds reasonable right? I just have one question about it? If I KNOW that every time I run a newspaper ad I will generate a profit from it why would I ever quit running the ad?That would be stupid. I can still try radio as long as the budget fits, and if the radio really does turn out a larger ROI than the newspaper ad. Great, I’ll simply do both!

I’ll make my point. Search engine traffic is free. Even if you are not great at SEO or your attempts completely fail, you can still pull in some traffic from the search engines. The traffic is consistent. The traffic converts. No matter how low the conversion rate may be, a sale is a sale. Why turn it down.

Keep optimizing your sites people, and for fuck sake authors, quit wasting your and our time by writing articles on ways NOT to market our sites. All they mean to us is one less competitor.

Side note: For those of you who are wondering, the radio ads converted about the same. Also, I didn’t put the x’s to hide anything from you or to give any advice about newspaper/radio investments. I’m just not comfortable disclosing private company information and the actual numbers were irrelevant.