Does My Website Need SEO?

It’s pretty absurd how often I hear this simple statement, “Thomas I have a website, now what?” The answer is actually pretty drop dead simple when you go back as to the WHY you have a website. The truth behind it all is that you have it because of business. You want more business and so ultimately you want to get more eyeballs on your website because you want to generate more revenue.  SEO is the basis of this. Search engine optimization is the key to getting your website found. But the real question is should every website focus on SEO as their next marketing endeavour? The answer is a resounding, “No!”

The simple truth is that there are some businesses I work with that are so raw and immature in their own business development that dumping money into SEO right at the beginning is just not good money spent. That might be great for some SEO companies, but that would be really bad Karma for me, and bad marketing advice. Balancing and juggling your marketing dollars is often really hard when you’re starting out because often your marketing budget doesn’t exist. The key here is knowing what you are about as the business owner you are. Are you able to survive in this type of landscape? Does dumping resources into SEO translate if: 1) It takes time to Organically Rank (and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re lying) 2) You need clients now because you need to generate revenue.

It takes time to organically rank (and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re lying)

So here’s the thing you need to figure out: Figure out how much money you have to spend on your marketing dollars. Weather it’s $100, $1000, $10000, come up with a figure. Then next is look at what the expectation as to what that number is supposed to is to generate. So if you want 2 new clients based off your $100 expectation then you know that each client acquisition going to cost you $50. Now you can reverse engineer how to find a new client for $50. Does that mean then we advise that you should be doing SEO? Does that mean you should be doing Google Adwords or Facebook Ads? Or does it mean if you’re a plumbing business that I tell you to go to a residential area and shake every home owners hand because $50 just isn’t enough to get the type of ROI you’re expecting. You see, web companies are usually great at design, but they don’t take into account the digital marketing funnel. That’s something that’s really important and it helps us execute on the behalf of our clients.

Sometimes it means we just can’t SEO a client because they’re frankly speaking doing bad business. SEO can’t fix bad business. The next time someone mentions that they’re an SEO guru think about what they’re trying to sell you.   And think about if it’s really in your best interest. It’ll shock you when actually look at the type of things they’re doing and how it is not executing for their clients.

We’re straight practitioners, period.