In an article from Adotas.com, Gavin Dunaway writes an interesting article on the value of SEO.
Excerpt:
DIGITAL DUE DILIGENCE – VCs don’t like SEO-dependent companies, because SEO isn’t the competitive advantage it used to be. Wall Street doesn’t like SEO because it’s too much of a black box.
They’re both wrong: public perception of SEO is, by nature, a few years behind the industry most of the time. Why?
1. People are usually aware of SEO when it’s done badly: most people think of news as “news” and not a smart SEO play; most people think of keyword-stuffed articles as SEO, not as an obsolete SEO strategy.
2. The people who try to rank for SEO-related terms are usually selling high-margin, low price-point products, which tend to be scalable and commoditized.
http://www.adotas.com/2011/09/smart-investors-systematically-undervalue-seo/