Friday, March 29, 2024

Merits And Demerits Of SEO Marketing

Digital marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea. Furthermore, if you are not an expert in this field, you may find yourself surrounded by a lot of uninvited problems. The foremost problem faced by businesses is the inability to decide which tool would best match their digital marketing needs. Owing to the massive positive effects of digital marketing with regards to customer outreach, the term digital marketing has now become a terminology used for many ways of increasing digital outreach.

Not all the businesses have enough marketing budget and prowess like their multinational counterparts. Hence, they resort to budget-friendly ways and take help from budget-friendly companies that offer local search marketing services for small businesses.  Search engine optimization is one of the most popular and cost-effective digital marketing strategies. Think again, is SEO worth the hype? And if it would have been so beneficial in the first place, why would big companies be splurging on high budget digital marketing strategies?

Now, SEO may be a smart way of increasing organic traffic to your business website,but it comes with its set of disadvantages. If you want to consider SEO as the main channel for digital marketing for your business, it is best to have in-depth know-how of the pros and cons it comes with.

The following article covers the advantages and disadvantages of SEO marketing. This is sure to help in clearing out the myths and hype associated with SEO marketing

What is SEO marketing

The simplest explanation of SEO marketing is making your website optimized in accordance with the rules and algorithms set by Google so that it ranks at the top, whenever someone searches for relevant products or services like yours. There are a lot of factors that get involved in search engine optimization of a website, for example, it works not only in improving the result page ranking of the website but also works on building the website’s authority on the internet.

Disadvantages of SEO marketing

  1. SEO takes a lot of time: SEO marketing is not meant for businesses that expect an immediate result. It takes time for search engines to index your content. This time frame can range anywhere from several hours to several days. Since SEO marketing is all about improving the position of the website on the search result page, SEO marketing may promise results, but at a very slow pace.
  2. Attracts attention beyond the targeted audience: This may sound counter-intuitive but attracting audiences larger than your targeted numbers can get things a bit out of hand; particularly if your business is still in the infancy stage. You do not want to end up with many orders or demand for your products and services when you cannot fulfill all of them. This may land you in a frustrating situation with your business’s goodwill at stake and too many unhappy customers. If your business website aims at targeting B2B platforms, SEO marketing may get you too many sales leads. It may be time-consuming in filtering out the ones that may be beneficial for your business.
  3. The risk of being penalized: If like most businesses, you opt to get professional help in SEO marketing of your website, you can never be sure that the service provider is doing a reliable job or not. The market is full of black hats and white hats. The black hats will break the rules to achieve the desired results for your marketing campaign. You will be surprised when, after a while, your website will be penalized or banned by Google for using unfair means. The white hats, on the other hand, work hard to get the desired results through fair means, but it is difficult to identify right from wrong in such a dense market.
  4. SEO doesn’t promise results: You can never be too sure of achieving desired results through SEO marketing. Google hasn’t given a set of definite rules or algorithms it uses for indexing and ranking websites through the content. It is quite likely that you may be banking on SEO to generate organic traffic and hence business for your website, but your website may not end up in the top ranks. Shocking enough, but this is how the Google search engine works. In addition, Google’s algorithm keeps on changing, which makes things even more difficult for a digital marketer.

This image shows the frequency of Google’s algorithm updated over the years.

Advantages of SEO marketing

  1. Promises a constant flow of targeted traffic: If your SEO game is strong, you can be sure of receiving a constant flow of organic traffic towards your website. This is perhaps the first step in the success of your digital marketing campaign.
  2. SEO marketing increases the conversion rate: Online shopping has revolutionized things. People do 70% of their online marketing research and then buy what suits them the best. SEO plays an important part in maintaining the flow of organic traffic and thus increasing the conversion rate. How do you expect to be noticed if your website does not make it to the top of the list? This is where SEO marketing helps.
  3. SEO promises authority in your niche: With the right SEO marketing tactics, you can end up at the top of Google’s search result page. If this happens consistently, you are sure to earn an authoritative position in your niche over the internet. According to statistics, the first five organic links account for 67.60% of clicks on Google’s result page. People take pages for being reliable when they keep on frequenting them.
  4. SEO is free, almost: Considering you are working on SEO marketing for your website on your own, it will cost you almost nothing, speaking financially. This is the main reason small and mediocre sized enterprises choose SEO marketing.

Take away

SEO marketing is one of the most powerful and commonly used ways of digital marketing. However, it is not wise to rely completely on this strategy alone. Like any other marketing tool or technique, SEO marketing has its share of setbacks that may do harm to your website and business’s authority and presence on the internet.

Teodora Torrendo
Teodora Torrendohttps://www.ccdiscovery.com
Teodora Torrendo is an investigative journalist and is a correspondent for European Union. She is based in Zurich in Switzerland and her field of work include covering human rights violations which take place in the various countries in and outside Europe. She also reports about the political situation in European Union. She has worked with some reputed companies in Europe and is currently contributing to USA News as a freelance journalist. As someone who has a Masters’ degree in Human Rights she also delivers lectures on Intercultural Management to students of Human Rights. She is also an authority on the Arab world politics and their diversity.

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