Almost every week I am approached by clients who need more traffic to their website from the major search engines.

Quite often they have been approached by (or have approached) consultants offering to this but have baulked at the fees. Now, I know that the fundamentals are pretty east to achieve if you have the knowledge, experience, inclination and time but many small businesses rarely have any of these and yet some many feel that good search engine optimisation [SEO] can be delivered quickly and cheaply.

Let’s look at this scientifically, around 49m people use the web in the UK (77% of the population apparently). Of these about 80% use search engines to find what they are looking for, which equates to 39.2m people and approximately 95% of them use Google as their search engine of choice – 37.2m people.

Now, let me ask the question, how much is it worth to expose your brand to a potential audience of this size?

Lets look at TV first. There is the cost associated with the production of the advert, script writing, casting, production, filming and editing. According to the Televisual magazine, the average cost of producing a 30 second advert for TV is around £140,000. Then there is the cost of your slot. This will vary based on your target channel, whether you want a regional or national ad, the time of day, the product to be advertised and the show (s) that are on either side of the ad break targeted so something at 9pm is going to cost much much more than a slot at 2am when the audiences will be far lower.

For a 30 second national ad on ITV1 between 7pm and 10pm a 30 second slot will cost from £60,000 and £75,000 rising to £250,000 for peak time Saturday and Sunday evenings [think X-Factor and Downton Abbey] and this is likely to reach between 5m and 9m viewers depending on the popularity of the show.

Too much? Then think about radio or the print media, both of which have lower costs (both production and media costs) but also have significantly lower audience figures.

In all of these cases, the costs will be for a one-off and most people with any experience of advertising know that one-off adverts simply do not work, so you have to pay for a campaign.

All of a sudden fees quoted by Search Engine Optimisers actually begin to actually look like pretty good value for money bearing in mind that if they succeed, then your site will be in front of the largest possible audience 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

To understand how effective search engine optimisation can help your business please give me a call on 01793 238020 or drop me an email to andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk