SEO: Is Organic Really Free?
SEO is the non-paid version of SEM because it doesn’t involve going to http://adwords.google.com/ and paying Google for your site to be visible instantly on SERP (search engine ranking pages). Once the budget is gone in SEM, so do you on SERP. In SEO, it will take time for your rankings to drop when you stop SEO but it also takes time to build SEO.
Since SEO is the non-paid version, it takes time to rank on SERP unless it’s a brand keyword. You have to think of various strategies on how your site will be “popular” in terms of views/traffic and backlinks. The algorithm of Google isn’t so kind either so black hat won’t work and may even get you penalized.
Years ago, SEO used to be free when Google algorithm wasn’t as sophisticated which is why it is considered free/organic. You would simply stuff keywords on your site and content, get as many backlinks as you can from link farms, forums, and blog commenting and you get a chance at ranking immediately. Competition wasn’t that pretty tight back then, too, since there were a few who knew about SEO. Soon, SEO methods had to change because Google rolled out their Panda, Penguin, etc updates in order to quality control the search result rankings. Many websites saw their rankings drop when these were rolled out.
So how did SEOs adapt? They had to partner with each other through link exchanges and guest postings so that it would still be free. But there were those who were still focused on quantity so guidelines from webmasters or website owners became strict like word count, keyword count, topics, link count, and so on. Eventually, there were those who saw the opportunity and asked for different exchange/s like free items for reviewing or money. It still happens today and the paid route is usually the fastest to get a dofollow backlink from a site owner so best to explain these to your client/s or boss. There are still free methods to get backlinks like uploading content from low quality sites but their spam score are usually high. For other free guest posting sites, it may take a long time for your content to be approved because of their claimed high number of submissions or that they’re busy so it can be indefinite on when to get a free dofollow backlink especially if you have weekly or monthly targets.
Also, popular SEO tools used to be free back then but currently not anymore since there were a surge of users. Again, SEO isn’t so free with high quality paid tools. SEO is rather an investment as it takes time to build and grow.
