SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, often taking several months to deliver a good return on investment.
In the short term therefore, the investment on SEO can seem large in comparison with the results.
So in this article, we go over the advantages and disadvantages of SEO, to help you make an informed decision on where SEO fits within your broader marketing strategy (alongside activities offering a quicker return for example).
Disadvantages
As with most things in business, but specifically SEO, your work is never done. With the constant changes to Google’s algorithms, you and your team will be needing to trial and error more than anyone would care to admit. There will be times when you think you hit the nail on the head with the blog topic, only to discover a few days later that Google really didn’t appreciate it quite the same way that you did.
SEO is not a new game, and there will be plenty of competition for every player. Large amounts of competition and a small budget will ultimately result in companies taking years to catch up – good news if you’re the one that’s in the lead, not so good if this is all a new venture for you.
And finally, SEO is a long-term play game with few short term wins, especially if you’re up against a large number of competitors in a mature market. If you’re looking for a strategy to bring in sales with little effort, time, and money then an SEO journey is really not what you’re looking for. It is a known fact amongst the industry that it will take at least four to twelve months to start seeing the rewards from all your efforts. We know that we can sometimes bring results within 1-2 months in low competition scenarios, but typically the journey to high levels of ROI is longer than that.
But before you decide SEO is not the right fit for you, let’s take a look at the advantages of SEO…
Advantages
With all your hard work, there will come lasting results. Once you’ve done your work and established your rightful place at the top of page 1, you can reduce your monthly spend to a maintenance rate, but still see no drop in your website performance. While there will be times you will need to blast out some additional work on your website to keep up with constantly changing Google algorithms, the back of the job is broken.
Word of mouth referrals are great for every company, and they help to bring you influence in your market. However, there’s still a large network of potential clients that you will never be able to reach this way. That’s where SEO comes into play. Whether on a regional or international level, your website can dramatically boost the number of people who interact with your business.
For all this hard work, everyone wants to be rewarded with a high return on investment (ROI), and if you and your team get your SEO done well, that’s exactly what you’ll be treated with. When a potential customer is searching for your product or service, it will generally mean that they are ready and willing to part with the cash – so get your website at the top of page one, and the chances of them converting into a client increase dramatically.
