When a company considers whether to invest in SEO, usually they are thinking in terms of lead generation or increasing revenue. Obviously these are important, but did you ever consider how SEO increases your company’s value?
Strong organic search engine visibility is a valuable asset for companies, just like a product patent or a popular brand name.
What if you have long-term or short-term plans of selling your business? Dominating your niche, or being one of the top players, means a new buyer would have a solid foundation in terms of traffic, leads and generating revenue.
Calculating SEO’s Worth
Consider two business operating in a super-competitive market, with everything else equal. The first company ranks well for their most important keywords (high conversion potential keywords and high volume keywords) and the other company is invisible for queries on Google.
Matching that position, the second company would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars investing in SEO for years to come – but if the first company continues to expand their SEO campaigns maybe they’ll still remain significantly behind in terms of organic search. So years later the second company is still playing catch-up with their SEO, and over the years they have lost tons in opportunity cost of online revenue or leads from organic traffic to the other company.
A smart buyer would be careful to weigh these things before they made an offer.
Providing the Right SEO Metrics to Buyers
Maximizing the value of SEO assets involves more than just proper execution of campaigns, they also need to be reported appropriately and convincingly to potential buyers. This will include:
- Reporting accurate organic search traffic numbers and year-over-year performance.
- Reporting keyword strategies based on volume and conversion potential (ranking highly for keywords nobody uses may impress novices, but not sophisticated business analysts).
- Producing comparative SEO reports demonstrating your company’s SEO performance versus that of competitors.
Ready to investigate SEO as part of your asset-building strategy? Please contact us to talk about your goals. We work with businesses in this situation regularly and can give you perspectives based on real-world data.
