Newcomers to SEO sometimes ask why search engine optimization matters. Here’s one of the points I made at an early version of the Essential SEO Workshop.

I was speaking to a group of spa and salon owners, at a function organized by Dermalogica Canada. A quick look at Google’s free Keyword tool came up with the following:

The top spa-related search term, for Toronto, is “Toronto spa,” and it gets more than 60,000 queries A MONTH. If you could get just one percent of those people to your site, and convert just one tenth of those people into customers, you’d have 60 new customers. Each month. Without paying a penny in advertising. Keep doing that month over month and you might need to consider an expansion pretty soon.

That’s why I love SEO.