Proof SEO is Worth the Long-Term Investment (Case Study)

Hands down, the hardest sell for a digital marketing agency to a small business owner is investing in SEO services.

We get it — how do you convince someone to spend months (and months) of money on a service that may only slightly move the needle on organic search engine rankings over time?

The only way we've been able to put the importance of Search Engine Optimization is this:

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Just like training for a marathon, it doesn't matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everyone on the couch. And if you keep putting forth those efforts without giving up, eventually you will beat your competitors who aren't being consistent in the same efforts. The harder you train, the faster you will advance.

And that is the investment business owners need to understand when it comes to ranking organically on search engines like Google by the way of SEO services.

But all of it is here-say unless you can see proof, right?

When I started this digital marketing agency, The Digital Perch, I deliberately chose to not put any advertising dollars into growing my business online and ONLY focus on bare-minimum SEO efforts to see how long it would take to get business organically.

What I mean by bare-minimum efforts:

• 1 blog post every few months

• Making sure each website page has all the relevant keywords and meta is optimized for SEO.

• Building 1 citation (business listing / directory listing online) every few months.

• Optimizing my Google Business Profile, including Google Post / Update once every handful of months

Here's what happened....

Looking at the average position metrics across all months:

- Feb 2022: 85.21

- May 2022: 78.39

- June 2022: 76.40

- July 2022: 76.93

- Aug 2022: 74.10

- Sep 2022: 69.28

- Oct 2022: 54.65

- Nov 2022: 64.30

- Jan 2024: 60.64

- Feb 2024: 64.38

- Mar 2024: 42.75

- Apr 2024: 41.37

- May 2024: 56.60

- June 2024: 51.99

- July 2024: 61.42

- Aug 2024: 64.96

- Sep 2024: 48.29

- Oct 2024: 30.95

- Nov 2024: 41.85

- Dec 2024: 29.26

- Jan 2025: 43.38

- Feb 2025: 31.29

- Mar 2025: 33.26

Summary: In 3 years of BARE MINIMUM Search Engine Optimization efforts, without paying a dime, my organic search rankings improved 50 spots. At this rate, if I continued this trend of low-level efforts, I could potentially be in the top 10 spots (or page one) in just a couple years or less.

This gives me great hope, because there were several months where I feel like I didn't do anything with my website or online presence regarding SEO efforts and my rankings still continued to improve over time. Slowly, yes. But imagine what it might look like if I chose to go hard in SEO efforts over that period of time? Would I already be at the top 10 results (or higher) for keywords I want to rank for? I truly think so.

SEO is a long-term game, but worth every effort. Keep going. Don't give up. It's a big investment at first, but when you start showing up organically for searches that bring you more prospective customers (without having to pay for those leads via ads), then that is a WIN for LONG-TERM SUCCESS.

Because as small business owners, long-term success is what we are all really here to do.

Invest in Search Engine Optimization services. It's worth it.

Need SEO services for your small business? Contact us today.