Most online brands and businesses innately understand the need for marketing and promotion. Whether you operate a small business or manage a large corporation, visibility in the digital realm is crucial for increased sales, additional leads and other positive elements of engagement.

Increasingly, some brands have begun to shift away from targeting search engines via organic means, and are focusing on strategies such as email marketing, social media and paid advertising. Depending on your business model and resources, these strategies can deliver substantial results.

Despite this, search engine optimization remains a valuable strategy for any online brand. Below, we’ll address some of the most important reasons why this is still true.

Ads Are Expensive (and Relatively Ineffective)

The simple reality is that proper search engine optimization can provide a plethora of clicks, purchases and other forms of engagement, while other forms of marketing are far less effective.

PPC ads are a perfect example. Under the best of circumstances in paid search, most brands will be ecstatic to convert as few as 1 in 20 who see their ads. On social media, the click through rate is even lower. While you may be able to easily target a large number of people for a relatively low cost, the vast majority of impressions are effectively wasted, meaning that you’re pinging noise and paying for the privilege of doing so.

Competitors Are Stealing Your Visibility

Even if your marketing model is sustainable with a paid strategy alone, the absence of a quality SEO campaign means your competitors are likely benefiting from the lack of organic engagement. Within your otherwise relevant SERPs, less competition means it is easier for brands to ascend the ranks of search and capture customers, subscribers and visitors for themselves.

Those in your target audience who are looking for solutions will find your competitors instead of you, meaning that you’ve just ceded a huge share of your potential audience to others. As such, SEO is an important task that helps you just as much as it prevents your competitors from gaining.

Most Websites Remain Invisible in Search

Hoping for the best when it comes to visibility in search engines is a bad idea. Even if you have other options for promoting products and content, seizing some organic traffic can help grow your brand and ensure a more sustainable model. Unfortunately, roughly nine in ten websites are effectively invisible in search engines, meaning they generate no organic search traffic.

Without a comprehensive SEO strategy, your chances of generating any search engine traffic is incredibly small. When considering that this could nerf your total visitor base by anywhere from 10 to 90 percent (depending on your broader marketing strategies), leaving these potential users on the table is a terrible idea.

Whether your brand is focused on organic search traffic or is currently using a completely different set of tactics, the benefits of SEO are too great to pass up. Ultimately, you may end up just pinging noise with ads and other forms of paid marketing. With competitors benefiting from any acquiescence of search targeting, the drawbacks are simply too big for brands to ignore this vital form of traffic.