What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has been long seen as a must-do for business owners with a website, or even for physical stores that want to attract customers to their brick and mortar location. But SEO is not all fun and games, and it often gives business owners a lot of headaches.

SEO for businesses is used to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers, and help them become the preferred recommendation amongst their competitors. You can achieve all these goals by optimising your content in order for search engines to see you as more relevant than other websites or business profiles offering similar products and services.

This being said, it’s clear that SEO has to be part of your digital marketing strategy. But it does come with several pros and cons, and it’s crucial to be aware of them before embarking on this long journey.

Advantages of Using SEO for Your Business

Here is a list of the pros of using SEO as a way of boosting your performance.

1. It’s a Free Way of Getting Targeted Traffic

One of the main goals of SEO is to make your content visible to the right people (your targeted audiences). If you want to make it on top of the search engine results pages, then your content must be relevant and valuable to the people searching for your keywords. By constantly providing quality and valuable content to your audience, you establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Prospects will then start turning to you for answers and advice.

2. SEO Brings in People Who Never Heard of You, But Need You

You can build brand awareness through more traditional marketing methods, but SEO does shine at this. By competing with other businesses in your industry for the same keywords, you have a chance of being the chosen one when people are not sure which brand to go for. In fact, SEO has a much higher close rate than email or traditional marketing.

3. You Can Become an Authority in Your Industry with the Help of SEO

As mentioned above, by publishing high-quality content and being a constant presence on social media and results pages, you can become a respected voice in your industry.

4. You Receive Real-Time Results of Your Performance

You can monitor the performance of your SEO strategy by using various online tools that give you real-time reports on your organic results and how your campaigns are going. You can personalise the reports and schedule them at your preferred frequency.

5. It Can Take Your Small Business to Another Level

Small businesses should be the first to invest in their SEO strategy, as it’s an affordable and effective way of establishing a strong relationship with their audience, and securing a good place in the search engine rankings.

Disadvantages of Using SEO for Your Business

As with almost all things in life, SEO certainly has some disadvantages. It’s best to know about them, because it will help you predict possible issues and set realistic expectations.

1. It Can Take a Long Time Before You Start Seeing Results

A big disadvantage of SEO is that you won’t see results overnight. This is why many website owners choose black hat tactics to speed up the process and get short term results, only to find themselves on top of a big mess when Google flags their website as untrusted. Success may take a long time, so plan your SEO efforts accordingly.

2. You Have to Constantly Be on Top of Your Competition

If you do see advantages in using SEO, you can bet that your competitors saw them as well. Prepare for a constant race to the top of the search engine results pages.

3. Search Engines Keep Changing Their Algorithms

To excel at SEO, you have to be always in the know when it comes to search engine algorithms. As your goal is to make them choose you over other similar pages, you have to know what they consider relevant.

Need Help With Your SEO?

Australian Internet Advertising is a leader when it comes to SEO, and has helped countless small businesses, but also industry giants to achieve their marketing goals. The expert digital marketers that work on our golden team have the expertise, passion, and discipline required to create effective SEO strategies for any type of business that needs their help. They will also make sure you understand the advantages and disadvantages of any SEO decision before you agree to it.

Contact us now to get a free consultation from one of our online experts and see what tasks you can delegate to us, and how you can make SEO work to your advantage.