Yes, I provide SEO services for businesses across the country and it may be a little strange to do a blog post about why you shouldn’t do SEO, but sometimes it is best to know up front. There are some factors involved in your business process that can make SEO very difficult or at the very least a few steps down the road from where you are currently. So I wanted to take a look at some reasons why SEO may not be right for your business, or at least not right now.
You Don’t Have A Website (Or a very bad one)
Seems fairly obvious, but you need to have a website to get found. Even now with Google and other services providing “free” websites, it is definitely harder to get one of those free websites ranking well unless you have very little competition. Even though Google tries to keep more searchers on your Google My Business page without even going to your website, your website strength that is attached to your My Business listing is an important factor to your ranking. It is sort of putting the cart before the horse to try SEO without having a website. We can help you get your website built and ready to go, but there isn’t much we can do as far as SEO if you don’t even have a site or your site is outdated and needs to be rebuilt because it is not mobile friendly or is built in an old way that makes it unable to index.
You Need Immediate Traffic
If you are a new business and are relying completely on internet traffic to get your sales going, you may need to start with a pay per click program. Though it may be smart to build some SEO into your long-term goals, if you need immediate traffic and haven’t done SEO before or are in a large, and competitive market, SEO is not your first answer. Google Adwords or other pay per click programs will bring you immediate traffic and help you understand who is buying or even whether people will buy. Though not necessarily as efficient as SEO, you can get traffic immediately with PPC. You can have traffic this afternoon if you start a paid campaign. This may be the first step for a brand new business that doesn’t have time to wait for organic search presence to grow.
You Are Entering An Extremely Competitive Market
Often online stores struggle with SEO. If you are selling to a mass market and can’t narrow your market by geography or very specific niche, and your website is primarily just product listings, there may be a large curve to get SEO going and you are likely up against the behemoth national chains and Amazon. Often, as is the case above, PPC can help even the landing page a little bit and gain you traffic without having to catch the others with domain strength, which takes a lot of time to reach a nationally competitive level. Though if you are in it for the long-term, it is probably a good idea to build an element of SEO into your plan, you will take quite some time to see the fruits of that labor, and PPC is probably your first step into search.
Can’t or Won’t Invest in Content
If you can’t provide a lot of good content on your site to help users understand what you do and why they should choose you, you are probably going down the wrong path with SEO. We offer copywriters that can help put your ideas into writing if you aren’t comfortable with writing, but the content needs to be there. In the SEO world, Content is King, and it is more so than ever. If you aren’t interested in providing good, unique content to your visitors, then SEO is probably not going to work for you. Whether you write it, someone on your staff, or an outside agency, it needs to be done or it just won’t work.
You Do a Bad Job
reviews are a big part of your online presence these days. Especially if you are a local business, and probably more and more for any type of business, online reviews are critical to your online success. In general, this should just help to push you to do a better job, but if you have a poor reputation and a history of angry customers, an online presence may just accentuate that and create even more headaches. I hope in most cases, this is not the situation, but if you think you have a lot of customer service problems before you have an online presence, it will just be amplified when angry people find they can voice their opinions on your Google My Business page or Yelp. I would say if you are in a situation where you are getting a high amount of negative feedback, even if you are not online, you should look at rectifying the issue.
SEO is Almost Always a Good Idea
These days you almost always need to consider some form of SEO for your business to survive. It is rarely the case where SEO is not helpful in a more Google-run world. With the examples up above, even a few of those would work well with SEO added in for the long-term. If you decide to do SEO, we have a plan for you and will do it right. If SEO is not the answer, or not the immediate answer, we will let you know that too.
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