Search engine optimization remains one of the great equalizers in the world of online brand exposure and digital marketing. While there are many ways to gain exposure within a given audience, most require ample time or immense amounts of money: small businesses and new brands don’t necessarily have the resources to invest like that.

Nevertheless, with the advent of online advertising and other forms of digital marketing, some brands are forgoing SEO altogether and pursuing different strategies to attract attention. The reality is that this can be costing brands in a big way: both financially and otherwise. Let’s look at what you could be losing by ignoring SEO for your brand’s marketing efforts.

The Cost of Paid Ad Campaigns

Increasingly, brands are opting to pay for exposure rather than earn it over time. Through platforms such as Google and Facebook, it is easier and cheaper than ever to run PPC campaigns targeting specific audiences. Unfortunately, this can ultimately turn into a very costly endeavor – especially when compared to SEO.

While SEO takes more work than pinging your website via a simple PPC campaign, it also provides long-term, passive benefit once achieved. Considering that you’ll effectively be spending $0 per click when utilizing SEO, suddenly that cost per click associated with PPC seems very steep. While PPC can be a great way to generate short-term exposure, relying on it exclusively can seriously hamper your profitability.

The Reality of Missed Opportunities

SEO requires a lot of work, but that work can lead to new and exciting discoveries. Namely, SEO is all about cultivating success within niches: finding small audiences that are relatively uncontested and then hammering away at them. When brands ignore SEO, they miss out on valuable micro-audience cultivation that can cumulatively generate large amounts of traffic.

Because non-SEO forms of marketing tend to focus on targeting larger audiences, brands often miss out on smaller audiences where less competition exists. The end result is spending more money to ultimately attract the same number of people: not a great trade-off.

The Vulnerability to Search Engines

One of the great things about being focused on SEO is the information gleaned from search engines while in pursuit of better outcomes. Brands that focus heavily on SEO keep abreast of the latest changes in search engine algorithms and audiences, helping them to be more resilient and responsive to changes.

When brands fail to focus on SEO, any natural or organic traffic generated through those search engines can be much more volatile. For example, sudden changes in how Google ranks or classifies content could result in fewer people pinging your website via search, losing the free traffic it does generate via search engines. This would then require even more paid campaign exposure to replace said traffic.

While SEO can be a lot of work, it provides meaningful benefits to brands that provide focus in cultivating it. Ultimately, time, money and traffic are all on the table: while there are other ways to attract attention in today’s world of internet marketing, most are more costly than SEO and create the conditions for a snowball effect in terms of losing any existing organic search-based traffic.