SEO as a practice carries a great amount of ambiguity about its role and its value for brands.

Once seen as a fringe scientific method to gaining digital traction, now any website owner or business manager has to utilise SEO in some shape or form in 2019 to be successful. According to SEO Shark, improving organic website traffic can convert visitors into new customers.

Despite the need to have a quality digital presence for consumers, there continues to be misconceptions that are spread by uneducated and outdated practitioners who believe their time and money is better spent elsewhere.

It is time to address those misconceptions and put them to rest once and for all.

‘SEO Is Too Hard To Understand’

When delving into the absolute detail on the practice of SEO, it is too hard to understand for most people. With Google changing and evolving their complex algorithms and sub-algorithms to alternate their platform, the basic principles can be lost on many marketers working on a generic level. However, it only requires the knowledge of a few helpful tips before operators can start to gauge how this system actually works. There are the two key elements of On-Page and Off-Page optimisation, the need to make loading speeds quicker on mobile, using keywords that consumers search for and having a message that resonates across platforms. Once those skills are taken onboard and applied in real time, the rest can be learned at a later junction.

‘You Have To Be A Trained Expert To Succeed At SEO’

An extension of the ‘too hard to understand’ talking point leads onto the notion of training and education. Like many digital fields, it helps to have an education and expertise to make the complicated look simple, but it does not act as a barrier for beginners and amateurs wanting to succeed from SEO. Training can include a variety of platforms, from reading books, watching YouTube tutorials, conducting Google searches for peer-reviewed articles or just speaking to peers and colleagues in the industry who know how to make gains.

‘SEO Costs Too Much Money’

SEO requires time, diligence and hard work but in terms of pure dollars - this is an exercise that doesn’t have to hurt the budget of a brand. It actually can operate under a self-sustaining model where any funds generated through digital traffic can be put back into the exercise to earn more consumer dollars. Outside of a few paid advertisements to leverage that initial momentum, this is a project that requires operators to read the terrain, make alterations according to behaviours from constituents and continue to churn out new content that people want to engage in. From a pure dollars and cents point of view, it is more than affordable.

‘Other Marketing Methods Are More Effective Than SEO’

This misconception about SEO is either true or blatantly false depending on your perspective and the context of the marketing method that is in use. For small rural communities who rely on print media to receive their news, search engine optimisation could be a project that fails to garner genuine cut-through if those constituents are not engaged on digital platforms. Outside of those small niches and very specific examples, there is no enterprise that could not stand to gain from improving in their visibility online. As of 2011 in Australia a staggering 78.9% of the population utilised the Internet and almost a decade on, that figure has only increased to approximately 9 in 10. No other marketing strategy has that much of a share of the market, from newspapers and magazines to billboard, posters, radio adverts or brochures.

SEO Summary

SEO is not too hard or too costly to be successful for any type of website owner or business. These excuses have long been proven to be outdated. Rather than approach the practice with fear or apprehension, start off small and take onboard information and feedback before getting a grasp of the practice. Before long, it will become a natural habit to engage in.