Everyone says SEO is free... But I'm finding it's both expensive and time consuming. After I stopped paying someone for professional SEO and moved to paid ads, my leads increased exponentially. Wha...

NEIL: The way I look at it is you should do whatever produces a ROI. The reason you are not getting great movements in rankings is the lack of authoritative links. Higher quality links move rankings faster... this is where guest posts help a lot.

In the blogging training video I go over guest posting... follow the tactics in there.

But yes you are right, SEO takes forever while ads can work right away. But if ads produce a positive ROI you should always do them and not stop even if you rank number 1 with SEO. Ideally, you should be doing both. Look at every marketing channel independently. If it produces a positive ROI, do it.

MIKE: SEO, to me, is a luxury. I prefer to do ads, social media, even phone sales before investing in SEO. One other thing I want to point out though is that we aren't all competing to get to page one on google for only 1 keyword. When you write good content, Google will rank you for long tail keywords you didn't know you were going to rank for. And if you have enough good articles, the combined traffic from search is where you'll have an ROI. That's also why I like doing articles that don't have millions of searches a month, but I know there are enough people searching. It does require a lot of

One other thing I want to point out though is that we aren't all competing to get to page one on google for only 1 keyword. When you write good content, Google will rank you for long tail keywords you didn't know you were going to rank for. And if you have enough good articles, the combined traffic from search is where you'll have an ROI. That's also why I like doing articles that don't have millions of searches a month, but I know there are enough people searching. It does require a lot of

That's also why I like doing articles that don't have millions of searches a month, but I know there are enough people searching. It does require a lot of time, however, all of our businesses generate leads exclusively from SEO/content marketing. We don't spend $1 on ads.

So, it does work extremely well if you are willing to put in the time. If I were doing a small business or startup I would focus on paid first. Neil has been an advocate of SEO first because he writes well and does the content himself. He is a blogging machine.