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I’m an unabashedly open proponent of SEO; I think it’s simply the most cost-efficient, effective long-term marketing strategy a business can adopt (in most cases), and the data can largely back me up. I can cite case studies of businesses that have risen high in ranks, earned tons of new referral traffic from external links, and of course organic traffic, and tie those metrics to conversion ratios and customer values to calculate a rough ROI.
But SEO has even more benefits than that. For most search optimizers, everything begins and ends with traffic; an increase in traffic is a sure sign that the strategy is working, and without ample traffic, the strategy is useless. I don’t believe these things are true, because there are more secondary and peripheral benefits that people neglect. Why do they neglect them? Because they’re almost invisible, in the sense that they’re notoriously difficult to measure…
