Is SEO just about being found?

No, its not just about being found by the search engine and showing up high in the search results. It's also about conversion of visitors.

Conversion = the process of converting a visitor into a customer. You don’t want to be successful in getting lots of people to your website, if most leave after a minute. It’s ok if the visitor is not yet buying: any action by the visitor which brings this visitor closer to becoming a customer is fine and can count as a conversion. Examples of such actions are:

• The visitor prints information from your website
• Fills in a contact from
• Forwards (tell a friend)
• Subscribes to a newsletter
• Downloads some whitepapers, some product specifications, some training material, some manuals

Is SEO cost effective? -> ROI

ROI of marketing tools

ROI (return on investment) is typical business terminology: is it worth while to make a certain investment – will it pay itself back or not. In a marketing context, it indicates which percentage of your investment will be paid back on top of the initial investment with a given marketing instrument. It seems that SEO does have quite a good ROI.

That’s partially due to the fact that is doesn’t cost a lot (only some time to get good quality material on your website...), but might have quite good results. Compare that with really expensive marketing techniques like printed media advertising or TV advertising. So you should always bother about handling SEO correctly!

Below graph shows: "What are the top-three most-efficient forms of advertising or marketing you spend money on in terms of the return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS) that they yield?“ (ranked 1-3)":

Source: Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization survey of SEM agencies and advertisers