SEO is a considerable investment which you should balance carefully against the potential upsides of other initiatives.
Somewhat similarly to actual investing, get it right and you will reap dividends for years to come. Get it wrong and, well, you’ve wasted valuable resources you could have used elsewhere.
To help you make this decision, I’ll first outline the pros and cons of SEO as a growth channel. I’ll then walk you through the exact considerations I look at when assessing if and when to take on a project.
Let’s dive into it!
Key Advantages of SEO
1. Sheer Magnitude
Organic search is, by far, the biggest driver of traffic to websites (if we exclude Direct). For this reason alone, it’s a difficult channel to ignore.
Organic Search is responsible for 29% of web traffic according to Statista
While trendier channels like TikTok might grab more headlines, the reality is virtually everyone uses Google, with the number of searches increasing year-on-year.
Whether you’re looking for a solution to back pain, or an online payment system to integrate with your mobile app; our automatic response is to simply ‘google it’.
Generative AI represents a credible threat to search engines’ dominance in information retrieval, but the early data suggests people still want to browse a variety of sources when researching a topic or service, rather than take an answer from Bard or ChatGPT at face value.
2. Highly Targeted Audience
It’s hard to get more qualified traffic than from someone explicitly searching for a feature or solution your product offers.
‘What’s the best automated trading app’?
‘How can I get a credit card with no credit history?’
‘How can I get a mortgage when self employed?’
‘How do I buy bitcoin with a credit card’
Furthermore, you’re connecting with this audience while they’re in research mode and therefore more likely to take action than if they’re trying to pull their attention away from a social feed (this is a really underrated advantage in my opinion).
3. Scalable
With a good strategy and quality execution, you can predictably build out high quality traffic to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of visits per month, without being curtailed by cost per click budgets. You’re also not beholden to seemingly arbitrary CPC price increases.
4. Compounding Growth
There is usually no real variable cost to a group of optimised landing pages or blog posts you you created last year (other than perhaps an occasional refresh). This means those pages will often continue to generate predictable monthly traffic and revenue for years to come.
This compound growth means the ROI for SEO is often lucrative after the first few months, as traffic and revenue keeps growing without having to increase your spend.
Why Not Invest in SEO?
Here are some of the downsides of SEO:
1. It can take time
SEO is can take a while to get going. You need to be comfortable not seeing any return on your investment for at least a couple of months, often longer. If you needed eyes on your product yesterday, then you might be better off running some ads.
2. Competitive for bottom-of-funnel
Competition for mega-volume, bottom-of-funnel keywords, such as ‘buy bitcoin’ or ‘trading app’, can be incredibly intense. It would take years of huge investment to rank on page one for these if you were a brand new company. There will usually always be plenty of less competitive opportunities to take advantage of, but it’s important to understand what’s realistic before investing.
3. Degree of uncertainty
There is always a degree of uncertainty when investing in SEO due to the complexity of search engines and unreliability of third party keyword data.
While we can reduce this uncertainty with forecasts and models, we’re ultimately dealing with an opaque collection of algorithms which even Google’s engineers don’t fully understand at this point.
Occasionally ideas haven’t worked out as well as I’d hoped. And sometimes projects have far exceeded expectation.
4. It requires existing demand
SEO is great for taking advantage of existing demand, but if your product is a radical new concept, say, some kind of new DeFi Protocol which has completely re-imagined peer-to-peer lending, then it might make more sense to focus on demand generation.
You can still reach people in the awareness stage of the funnel, by educating more broadly about DeFi and P2P lending, but it won’t be nearly as big an opportunity as if you’d built, say, a crypto exchange, where the addressable market in google is massive already.
Key considerations to make before investing in SEO
So, should you invest in SEO? And if so, when should you start pushing? Below are the things I typically look at when assessing a potential project.
1. Big addressable market
How many people are searching for your product? Or pain points your product solves? And how many are researching your product’s topic area more generally?
Getting an idea of the potential upside is the most logical place to start when making an investment decision. The simplest way to do this is analysing direct competitor sites (i.e. your actual competitors) and audience competitor sites (i.e. sites which are targeting your audience more broadly but not monetising in the same way) using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
The key things I’m looking for are:
- How much organic search traffic are they getting?
- How much of that is unbranded?
- Is that traffic relevant and likely to be generating business?
2. Existing Product-led Growth
Having an awesome product which people are excited about makes life way easier from an SEO perspective. If you don’t have this yet, it doesn’t make sense to invest in your growth machine.
Not only does the traffic convert way better (thus making your SEO traffic more valuable), but you also tend to naturally acquire the required trust signals (backlinks from industry media, social signals, brand mentions) that are vital to compete in competitive markets like finance or crypto. You can manufacture these, but it’s a ton of effort.
Most founders or growth managers will instinctively know whether their product is spreading by word of mouth, but a good metric might be your viral coefficient – i.e. how many new users is an existing user generating on average?
3. Solid backlink profile
Other websites linking to yours are a key signal for Google that your website is trustworthy and useful. You may occasionally see some debate on this topic but let me just say unequivocally: backlinks are still a hugely important ranking factor.
Good products tend to acquire links naturally within their first few years, via PR from funding announcements, significant product updates, and thought leadership. These provide the required authority base you need to compete in competitive markets. Again, these can be manufactured, but it’s expensive and time consuming.
The easiest metric to use for this is number of unique referring domains in ahrefs – I’ll usually suggest waiting to have at least 500 decent referring domains before actively pushing on SEO.
4. Strong Non-SEO traffic signals
Some people believe traffic from sources outside of SEO (such as direct or social) to be a direct ranking factor after google suggested they use engagement data from google chrome in their algorithms. In other words – Google tracks what happens after you click through to a website to gauge if they should keep sending traffic your way.
While I remain sceptical of this (on the grounds it would be too easy to manipulate), I believe non-SEO traffic acts as a useful proxy for trust signals in general. That’s to say, if a site is getting a ton of traffic from diverse sources, it will likely be sending positive signals to the algorithm that they’re a credible brand, rather than just an SEO content farm.
Brands are a really important concept for Google, with former CEO Eric Schmidt once quoted as saying: ‘Brands are how you sort of the cesspool’ (the cesspool being, the internet). I see this trend becoming more pronounced, as Google tries to fight back against the epic amounts of spam being generated currently by generative AI.
You can easily get a sense of non-SEO traffic using your analytics tool of choice. You can also get a sense of how this stacks up against competitors using Similar Web. While there’s no hard rule, ideally you’re generating at least 10k visits per month from non-SEO channels.
Closing Thoughts
We talked about the huge potential opportunities offered by SEO and why it can be such an important channel for acquiring new users. We also looked at some of the disavantages compared with other channels, before outlining the considerations I would look at when deciding whether or not to invest in SEO.
If you are a fintech or crypto business considering investing in SEO but are unsure if it’s the best move, or maybe you’re already doing SEO and want some confidential feedback on your strategy, then feel free to book a no-obligation chemistry call with me on the link below. We’ll take a look at where you’re at, the potential upside, and an idea of what I’d do in your situation. Hope to see you on a call!