The Good and Ugly parts of SEO that no one tells you about.

The Benefits and Limitations of SEO for your Website in 2022
Whether it’s corporate branding, e-commerce, or general information sharing, websites are crucial to introducing your online services to a broader audience. Generally, they’re quintessential tools that help shape most parts of an entity’s online presence – perhaps now more than ever.
People use search engines like Google and Bing to access websites across the globe. SEO is the process that lets website owners organize their content to provide solutions to these searches on the internet. With SEO, you get to laser-focus on your target audience and keep up with their information needs as it changes.
However, given that SEO for companies and brand websites is quite powerful, it’s still important that you consider some of its nuances. What are SEO’s main advantages and drawbacks? This article takes a look at some of the main details to note on the topic.

What is SEO

SEO stands for Search engine optimization and is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

Advantages of SEO

SEO primarily lets you compete with rival websites for visibility on Google and other search engines. However, you get much more than a fighting chance. Below are some of the other benefits of using SEO tools on your website:

#1. More Traffic for You

Google typically receives over 40,000 web searches every second. That works to a little over 3 and a half billion each day. It’s a lot of internet traffic, and SEO lets you get a significant cut of those queries.
With effective SEO, your website could live on the first page of Google search results. Given most people don’t go past the first page, your site gets most of the resulting clicks and visits. The number could easily run into thousands and millions, letting you enjoy the benefits of keyword optimization.

#2. Better Brand Visibility

One of the advantages of SEO is the stronger brand visibility you get to have. When you’re getting traffic on your website, you inadvertently get recognized for it. As such, the more people visit the site, the stronger its visibility to other people. SEO lets you achieve that much easier.
Depending on your web content offerings, SEO lets you build a community of visitors who got exactly what they were searching for. In turn, they could refer other people, making you a growing authority in whatever information niche to which you cater.

#3. More Sales and Commissions

What happens when people can trust the information you give on your website? They can pay for any goods and services you offer, as a result.
Generally, SEO helps you drive up sales on your website with the traffic you receive. It’s a suitable arrangement if you’ve got an e-commerce site. Admins also use SEO-generated sales for affiliate marketing commissions.

#4. Precise Content Delivery

It’s common knowledge that the average netizen is likely to skim through online content. With thousands of sites offering the same information in a certain niche, admins often find themselves struggling to deliver the relevant content, enough to keep the audience interested.
SEO offers a smart solution by letting you focus on what matters: subjects your readers are searching for online. With that information, all that’s left to do is deliver content highlighting these interests. You get to earn the audience’s attention without interrupting their browsing patterns.

#5. Long-Term Cost Savings

Your website’s content needs to provide solutions to visitors’ needs. However, it has to be a sustainable effort. How do you ensure that you get returns on your content marketing strategies over and over again? Search engine optimization ensures that your web content keeps generating sales leads, long after you’ve invested the time and money to create them.

Disadvantages of SEO

It’s worth mentioning that SEO isn’t the holy grail for all websites. While the advantages of SEO are far-reaching for brands when properly implemented, you’d still need to look out for the weaknesses to search engine optimization. Below are some major disadvantages of SEO to consider:

#1. SEO takes Considerable Planning Time

Many website administrators erroneously think SEO boosts their site’s performance overnight. That’s entirely not true, as search engine optimization takes time to show results. However, SEO’s planning time is often cautionary, especially for brands looking to invest in their site’s presence on the internet. SEO processes have to work with several variables like the website’s size, domain age, and content relevance.
You’d have to handle these factors separately, making sure they’re right for optimization to fully work. Professional SEO tools like Ahrefs can help you figure things out, but will often cost a fee. That’s not to mention the time you’d have to wait to start seeing positive changes – about two to six months.

#2. SEO Sets you Head-to-Head Against Competitors

No matter the niche or industry your website caters to, you’d have to compete with several thousands of similar sites that offer the same content as you. SEO gives this competition a whole new definition.
Typically, search engine optimization lets you edge out the competition. However, it lays out your strategies for competitors to study, in the process. That sets you up for a constant dogfight with rival websites on who gets to outrank the other.
What’s worse, the site has to go against all of its competitors from anywhere in the world. Without constant keyword research and specific subject positioning, you could fall far behind on getting a spot on the hallowed Google’s first search result page.

#3. SEO Results Aren’t Set in Stone

For all your efforts to engage your website’s audience, SEO doesn’t guarantee you results – at least, not to the extent that you expect. In fact, it’s hard to predict what works on a certain SEO project you might have.
Why’s that so? For one thing, Google’s search engine algorithm changes frequently, to keep up with the search volumes and trends it receives each day. As a result, the top SEO keywords in your niche change by the minute.
But that’s not all: your SEO implementation’s success or failure depends on your competition’s actions or inactions. What information do they have that you don’t? It’s all going to play out on your site’s visibility over time.
Given all that, site admins can’t project SEO results objectively. Instead, they have to keep a keen eye on their metrics and that of their competitors.

#4. SEO Requires Uninterrupted Review

If you haven’t gotten the memo by now, SEO is far from a set-and-forget affair for your website. As a site admin, you’d have to keep a permanent and uninterrupted watch over your SEO implementations so as not to lose progress.
Also, you’d have some sort of SEO maintenance stage after implementation, which allows you to review your keywords and other deployed techniques. That way, the admin analyses On-page SEO performances, and initiates adjustments where necessary.

#5. You Can’t Take Shortcuts

The phrase, “work smart, not hard” doesn’t fly with SEO, as it demands hard work and grit all the way through. As a result, you really can’t take shortcuts in any of your practices and implementations. Generally, Google clamps down heavily on aggressive SEO moves on sites, in a bid to level the playing field.
The algorithm fishes out SEO tricks on websites – “black hat SEO”, as fondly called – and penalizes erring entities by downranking them or removing them from searches completely. Since Google’s regulations surrounding SEO constantly change, you can bet that enforcement will always be in full gear.
But what activities count as black hat SEO practices? For starters, inorganic traffic (readers and viewers bought or computer generated) will get detected and blacklisted. Also, stuffing your web content full of search keywords qualify as black hat, and won’t get you the desired result.
Therefore, you’d have to take the time to study Google’s algorithm to know its pattern on SEO best practices. More importantly, you’d have to ensure that the site remains in compliance, through meticulous reviews and adjustments.

Why is SEO Necessary Anyway?

Business websites are ubiquitous in today’s world. They let you create a necessary online identity. The site itself depends on the content to achieve the desired result. It’s worth mentioning that people who visit a website do so intending to receive the information or experience they seek.
That’s why you’d want to have great web content to deliver on those expectations. Such a strategy ensures that you reach the audience, and retain them for longer. However, it’s one thing to “give people what they want ” with your website, and another to know their needs in the first place. How can you tell when netizens want what you offer? Simple: check their search engine entries.
Of course, you can’t go through people’s devices or read their minds, which is where SEO comes to play. You’d need SEO to understand the internet user’s browsing habits, especially as it relates to your niche or industry.
Wrapping Up
Every upward-forward mobile website needs search engine optimization in 2022. But before starting out with the implementation, it’d help if you fully understood the nuances and advantages of SEO. We’ve highlighted some of the key benefits and limitations to note, as you optimize your content to appeal to a greater audience.