Do I need SEO for my website?

Try and research this topic, and you’ll find you’re playing a rigged game. The very best people at manipulating search results are the same people who want to sell you SEO services. Agencies control the conversation around SEO, and unsurprisingly advocate for more of it whenever they get a chance.

SEO can be really expensive, and we all know budgets can make or break a small business, so by writing this article, we're hoping to share some experiences and thoughts that might help anyone with an important SEO decision on their hands.

It should be noted this isn’t an article about how much we hate SEO. We don’t. There are many applications for SEO services, and we’ve seen some incredible results on campaigns over the years.

While it’s an industry famous for not providing guarantees, with enough time and expertise dedicated to an SEO campaign, an improvement in rankings is always possible.

The thing you should question is whether spending time and money on SEO is the best use of resource.

Sometimes it's easy to fall into a trap, thinking Google is the gateway to the internet, "my site is on the internet, so that's how we'll get found". But it’s important to remember, search is just one of many website traffic-boosting channels available. Before you decide whether it’s the right one to pour money into, it’s crucial to understand your sales cycle and how search factors in.

Working with Impelling, we learned IT support typically has a very long sales cycle, with prospects basically doing the polar opposite of an impulse purchase. Search was used to carry out due diligence on providers that emerged over the long sales cycle, but very rarely used as a way to find them. These insights helped shape a strategy, and we ended up scaling back our SEO efforts.

We also learned the terms people use to find your website should be considered carefully.

As a (completely unrelated) example, a Google search for “restaurant Sheffield” doesn’t return any results for a restaurant until page two. Google knows people searching for this kind of thing are probably wanting to look at different restaurant options, so the top spots are all populated by editorial pieces ranking restaurants in the area. If you’re a restaurant owner, it’s probably more valuable for you to be featured in an article titled “the 10 best restaurants in Sheffield” than it is to appear next to them, so you might conclude resources would be better spent chasing that goal, over search rankings.

You could also be operating in a market where there’s so much competition, it’s almost impossible to have an impact. Take a clothing start up for example, if you want your products to appear on the front page of Google you have to compete with the likes of John Lewis, ASOS and Next, companies with huge budgets. In this situation, you need to ask whether it’s worth taking on Goliath, or whether it’s more cost-effective to use alternative marketing strategies, like social media, or targeted video content.

Another thing to consider is websites highly optimised for SEO are a bit strange. You’ve probably experienced this when searching for something yourself. Sometimes you’ll just want a recipe for ravioli, but you end up on a webpage that explains the entire history of ravioli and pasta before getting to the point and listing the ingredients and method.

This long, cyclical, keyword laden content is what’s required to rank well on search engines, but the content isn’t written for humans, it’s written for the search engine algorithms. Really, you want the content on your website to be concise, helpful, and assist in selling your product or service. Unfortunately though, the type of content required for search engines is the opposite, and plenty of people don't realise they might have to make some serious compromises on their carefully considered website messaging when undertaking an SEO makeover.

All this extra wordy content - the over optimisation of the internet - is having a negative effect. In the quest to game the search algorithms, the SEO specialists are putting out mountainous volumes of (often AI generated) content to feed their strategies. It’s not helpful for humans, and the increase in noise, lengthy articles, and hard-to-read content irritates people.

Get too irritated and someone might start turning to TikTok, or ChatGPT for quick answers to queries, and who could blame them?

Google knows this, and probably has tabs on the situation. Google has the power and money to respond to threats to its business model, and if it needs to it will act quickly and ruthlessly, whether the consequences damage thousands of SEO campaigns or not.

Whether this happens is pure speculation, but it does feel like we’re approaching a turning point, with Google appearing to test the waters with a number of updates aimed at tackling AI generated fluff.

“Content is king” always used to be the motto of the search optimisation industry, but now we can use machines to generate content, maybe it needs updating to “good content is king”.

It's always been true, that if you regularly produce good, helpful content, people are going to gravitate towards your business and your website anyway. It’s the approach we’ve settled on at Unspun.

We hope to do good things and trust the results will follow naturally.

So what's the conclusion of this article? Are we saying SEO is dead? Are we advising you don't spend money on SEO?

Far from it, this is more of a series of thoughts based on experience and industry insight. Take it as you will.

Things do seem to be changing however, so we definitely advise pausing for thought before you jump feet first into an SEO investment.