When do you “need” SEO? 35 experts tell you.

Search engine optimization—is it a nice option for some businesses or an absolute necessity for every company? And if it’s truly needed, at what point is it vital? From the beginning? Once a business starts to gain traction? Or only when a company wants to grow, or sales need an injection?

We asked business and marketing experts to share their opinions about why SEO is important and when companies should incorporate SEO.

👇🏻 Scroll down to read the responses from 35 SEO experts.

To sustain accelerated growth

Hypothetically, if you own the sole bakery in a village of 100, everybody knows where you are, they love your cupcakes, you generate a steady income to support yourself as well as the daily expenses of running your bakery, and you’re content with that, you don’t need SEO.

Even for expansion, if you wish to expand to nearby villages, ‘traditional marketing’ means such as being featured in the local newspaper or a short, 15-second TV ad during commercial breaks might do the trick.

However, it’s not always that easy. If you want to sustain accelerated growth in a heavily saturated market with stiff competition, you need SEO. Having a business listed online is the bare minimum in this day and age, where the general public wants access to instant information to their questions at this very second. If they pass your bakery and cannot find any reviews of it on Google Maps, they may simply walk on by. You need SEO when you want to grow steadily, rapidly, in a foreseeable timeline.

Furthermore, I place a strong emphasis on accelerated growth. There are 3.2 billion users on the internet, and not having an online presence will limit the reach of your company. It starts with having a website, curating the correct content to the right cohort of customers, adopting heavy localization and reaching a broader customer base internationally.

And SEO is not only about optimizing for Google (and other search consoles). It’s about sustaining visitors and converting them to “direct traffic,” building an online brand and creating an information hub for individuals who have even a slight thought about your business.

To sum it up, SEO is a need when it’s:

• The minimum requirement for survival
• The minimum requirement to grow

Depending on the nature of your business, of course.

Before it’s too late

At the point that a business is ready to be found by the general public. Unfortunately, it is not even considered by most businesses until it’s too late. SEO should be thought about before you even create the content going onto your website.

To grow

“Need” is a strong word. I’d say that businesses only really “need” SEO if they’re struggling to achieve their desired growth rate through other means, and their ideal search terms are moderately-to-highly competitive. SEO is very hard to get right accidentally. It really does require a strategic approach, and the more competitive the landscape is, the more time, energy, and investment it takes to increase rankings.

As soon as you’re online

A business needs SEO as soon as it is online.

Most people think of SEO as the practice of inserting relevant keywords into corresponding pages on a website, but in reality, that is just the most basic step in SEO. There are technical aspects of SEO that require constant attention, maintenance, and testing; there are human interaction aspects of SEO that impact how visitors interact with your site; and there are more page features that can be optimized to be more search engine friendly.

As soon as you launch your site, you should be making sure that you are taking all of these things into consideration when making decisions for how to build your website. Whether you are optimizing for local SEO, sales or business on a national level, or optimizing for an international audience, you need to be implementing SEO best practices from day one.

When you start your website

Nowadays SEO is deeply integrated with web development. If your site is built the ‘wrong’ way, you could have a harder time appearing on search engines, which may hinder future digital marketing efforts. If you want to establish an online presence, start paying attention to SEO best-practices right when you start building your company website.

Right from the start

I would argue that a website needs SEO right from the start. The quicker you get started, the quicker you’re going to get results. The thing to remember is that SEO covers a number of things – we talk about:

• technical SEO
• content SEO
• local SEO
• backlinking SEO
• conversion rate optimization

Those are five areas that I would encourage any business to get started on as quickly as possible. I would think that you would want to do the technical SEO, the content SEO, and the local SEO, and setting up your Google My business immediately. If you can get those things done up front, you’re going to have a head start over everyone else.

After you have a well-designed website

Assuming they already have a website that is well-designed, up to date and fit for its purpose, a business is at the point they need SEO when:

• They seldom or never receive any inbound leads, inquiries or sales through their website.
• Their website is not easily found for any targeted search queries that are relevant to their sales funnel.
• If applicable, they are not featured in any map listings when searching within a close vicinity to their location.
• Their competitors are actively working on SEO as part of their marketing strategy.

Define SEO first

To answer this kind of question you have to first define what SEO really means. Are we trying to simply look good on a search engine when a user searches for the business? Or are we trying to rank highly to acquire more customers?

You could argue that a business never really “needs” SEO from a customer acquisition perspective as there are just so many marketing tactics available – and organic search is not the best fit for every business. However, I would argue that most, if not all, businesses need to look good online if a customer Googles the business name. Good reviews, a professional website, a good looking set of results when someone searches for your name–these things are all important.

We have a spectrum of possibilities here. A customer Googles your business name and can’t find your website. Rather, they find a series of bad reviews and inconsistent business information – not good. Your average business is in the middle – a prospective customer Googles the name of the business and they find the website and it looks okay. Then the ideal here is that a prospect searches you up, sees your business looking good, with a strong set of results and an information panel and lots of positive reviews and sentiments.

I would argue that all businesses need at least some basic SEO as soon as they get serious about marketing, whether that is SEO for the products or services they provide, content marketing or simply just looking good when a potential customer searches for the business. Ultimately, when marketing becomes important, SEO becomes important.

The day you go online

The day a business decides to go online is the day it needs SEO. From creating a Facebook page or Google My Business listing, to launching a company’s first website, SEO must be kept in the forefront of the decision making process. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and the business consequences of ignoring SEO best practices and tactics are costly beyond belief. Employing SEO for your website and digital footprint will ensure that search engines and users alike will get the right impression of you and evaluate you the way you want to be portrayed.

From day 1, keep SEO in mind.

When you want to be found online

We have a saying here at Futurety, “All marketing is search marketing.” Meaning, regardless of where you’re doing your marketing, we live in a Google world where your audience’s first action is likely to do an online search for your name or industry.

With this in mind, any business in an industry where they want to be easily found by a searcher, needs SEO. In only a few, very specific industries, is this not true—perhaps for sales processes where interactions are purely in-person or exclusively with an older audience that may not naturally jump to Google to verify information or pricing. Otherwise, SEO is valuable to essentially every business that wants to attract and retain engaged clients or customers.

We liken SEO vs other marketing in the same way you might look at buying vs renting: A short-term SEO project allows you to appear in Google searches with minimal maintenance over a long period of time, whereas paid methods are only as good as your pockets are deep. Even some basic, fundamental SEO setups on your site can make a big difference in your long-term business footprint.

From day one

SEO should be a priority for any organization – regardless of business model or industry – from day one. Strong SEO serves to not only position the company and the individuals and teams creating content for the company as thought leaders, but it is the most cost-effective long-term strategy to prime the sales and marketing funnels to drive revenue.

SEO never ends. It begins very early on day one of creating content and shaping your company’s website to drive as much traffic as possible by going after low-competition keywords, and continues years later when you own those keywords and are starting to compete for terms that show even greater buying intent to take your business to the next level. Either way, the core of a successful SEO strategy is consistency and understanding the difference between a good opportunity and one that will be too resource-intensive to provide much return on investment.

The earlier you can get started down this path, and encounter these decision-making moments around SEO, the better.

Gone are the days

Most new business owners do not realize that their website is their storefront. Gone are the days of the traditional mom and pop shops, where foot traffic was a must. Now, you need website traffic to grow your business.

When it comes to your business, you should consider SEO in conjunction with your website. If you have a website (which let’s face it, you should have a website) then you need to think about optimizing your site for Google and other search engines. The first page of Google is a must for your business if you want to be found; it’s the new storefront for the digital age. Developing a coherent, user-friendly website with SEO-rich content, which includes service pages, will help boost your site visibility and, ideally, your ROI.

Before you need SEO

Most brands begin a foray into search marketing using paid ads. Usually, this proves the efficacy of obtaining and converting search traffic, which gives them the appetite to grow. Paid search ads generally limit you to the ‘sharp end’ of the funnel, that is keywords with very clear intent that make paying for those clicks worthwhile. The issue is, the bulk of the search traffic lies upstream where consumers aren’t yet aware of your product or service and are searching for a solution.

With search being so competitive, even if your site is technically perfect, the chances of your stumbling into gaps, producing the right content, targeting correctly and [having your content get] the initial amplification by chance, are very low. Businesses generally need to make a start on SEO before they need SEO. There’s a first mover advantage, and most of your competitors are likely already making some kind of movement, so standing still until you want results just puts you to the back of the pack.

Extremely important

Unless your business is just drop shipping and relying on social media advertisements, then SEO is extremely important for businesses of all sizes, especially smaller ones.

The internet is a very crowded place – over 50% of the world’s population now uses it. This means that it’s getting much harder to get noticed, making SEO a crucial strategy for driving organic traffic to your website.

Getting this organic traffic means that you don’t have to rely on advertising either in Google shopping or social media, as you get a steady stream of potential customers filing through your site, regardless of if you are advertising on top of that or not.

Smaller companies should not try and compete for the extremely competitive keywords, but instead should find relevant niches that are much easier to rank for, but relevant enough to still get sales.

What is often overlooked when designing an SEO strategy is what the customers will do once they reach your landing page. You need to ensure that your landing pages are not only SEO-friendly but user-friendly. If a page is extremely user-friendly, then not only do you get higher conversions, but people stay on that page for longer, boosting your rankings even more. It’s also extremely important to keep the funnel, or flow, of customers extremely simple and quick in order to prevent drop-offs.

In summary, SEO is extremely important to companies of all sizes, even if strategies adopted by bigger, more established companies differ from small companies. It helps drive a flow of organic potential customers that will get you sales regardless of whether or not you’re running advertisements.

Most businesses need it

Most business needs SEO in general, but here are some specific situations when a business needs SEO more than ever.

When you don’t rank for your brand name in Google on 1st position.

Ranking 1st for your brand name is a must, and most people would think their business does rank 1st, but sometimes you would be surprised. For an example, for small hotels and BNBs, it is not uncommon to see their business on TripAdvisor or Booking.com come up as a 1st result in Google (organically). This is especially bad for lodgings as people can book through TripAdvisor and the hotel owner pays a 15% commission on those bookings, while he should get them on his official site with almost no commission!

When you start a new business or change your web domain of your site.

A fresh domain name is trouble for SEO, unless you had one previously, and it is redirecting to the new one. With a new domain, you will experience big problems ranking, even for your own name. You will need a lot of SEO planning for your new domain name.

In case of penalty.

Sometimes, Google can penalize your website for suspicious activities. Maybe you hired a bad SEO person that got you bad backlinks (even those from years ago can still hurt you) or a competitor or someone paid for a spammy attack on your site – linking from Viagra selling sites to yours. Sometimes, a new Google algorithm update can hurt your site, and SEO optimization that you did 5 years ago might now harm your site.

When you don’t show up in Google, but your competitors do

The most common one.

Holistically from the beginning

Any business would benefit from SEO from the beginning stages. If we think about it in terms of a lean methodology, a lot can be discovered about customer preferences and interest in specific products and services by doing keyword research. In addition, said research can also help to create clusters of content which can then define the taxonomy and structure of the whole website, which eventually will be the base of any specific efforts to competing for organic rankings.

In addition, we should understand the intersection between UX/ADA compliance and SEO, which relates to making the website accessible not only for search engine crawlers but also for any type of user. For this and many other examples, it is imperative to create a holistic strategy that includes SEO from the beginning to eventually crossover intelligence between any other digital discipline.

After paid search

For an early stage business whose objective is primarily business growth, I would suggest choosing paid search before search engine optimization.

In marketing, you are mostly likely to win if you don’t depend on any unpaid marketing tactics to generate leads. Search engine optimization is primarily to generate organic traffic/visits to your site. I am not trying to underestimate the value of good SEO, but when it comes to prioritizing your marketing efforts, you should give preference to paid search before SEO for one simple reason – control. Our big brother, Google, changes its search algorithm very frequently. While most of these changes are minor, they roll out major changes occasionally (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affect search results in a significant way.

For a marketer, it means you have to adapt your SEO efforts based on Google’s changing algorithm and guidelines, which you don’t have any control over. But, you have control over your ad placement through proper bidding and keyword selection in Google search engine marketing. Usually, the top three ads in the search are actual ads; then below that are the organic search results.

So, it’s better to begin your online marketing efforts on paid search since you can start running your ads in a week’s time and get leads from it.