Search traffic rocks. Even though just two years ago only 44% of shoppers began their purchase by using a search engine (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012), today I am sure this number is a lot higher. Moreover, 70% of these people click on organic listings instead of Adwords ads when looking for products (Marketing Sherpa 2012). Lastly, according to the same source, 76% of B2B companies receive 350% more leads from SEO than PPC (14% SEO vs 4% from PPC).
Yet in spite of so many obvious benefits, many businesses still refrain from actively engaging in SEO activities to promote themselves in search engines.
Whether you run a local business, an ecommerce store or small service company, it is crucial that you focus on increasing organic presence and traffic. What follows however is a list of the 7 most common objections against SEO along with explanation why they aren’t true.
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Objection 1: SEO doesn’t work
Many people believe that because of constant changes to search engines algorithms and various new developments in the online marketing industry, SEO techniques no longer work.
Nothing is further from the truth though. Many SEO techniques can still help a website to achieve higher rankings and increase its traffic.
To keep track of what works and what doesn’t and gain the most up to date insight into the industry, start reading dedicated SEO publications like Search Engine Journal, a site that I help manage that teaches people SEO for free.  We’re up to date on everything.  You can also check out my personal blog!
Objection 2: SEO is unpredictable
SEO has an opinion of being a very unpredictable and unreliable traffic source.
It’s true that unlike PPC for example, you don’t have much direct control over your traffic or rankings. You can’t just increase your marketing spend to push your listing higher in rankings (on the other hand, there are many other thngs you can do to achieve that effect. They however require time and constant testing and experimenting with new ideas).
It’s not true however that SEO traffic is unreliable. Once you optimize your site to it’s maximum SEO potential, there is very little chance that you will experience any problems with it.
SEO seems unpredictable only if you know very little of it. Once you educate yourself in the basics of search engine optimization, you will begin to understand how to use it to bring results and when that’s going to happen. Distilled’s DistilledU knowldege base is a great place to start learning the ins and outs of the industry.
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Objection 3: SEO changes too quickly
SEO is a fast developing industry. This is partially due to search engines constantly updating their algorithms, with many of those updates happening daily. Not all of those changes affect the website’s performance directly though, some are only minor tweaks that won’t affect your rankings in any noticeable way.
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Objection 4: SEO is too expensive
SEO is not free. In order to achieve results, you need to invest money, time and other resources in it. The cost of SEOÂ however is uncomparably lower to what it costs to promote a website through paid advertising channels like PPC for instance or purchasing traffic in any other way.
Moreover, compared to the total spend for the paid traffic options, SEO offers a fairly good ROI.
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Objection 5: SEO takes too long to bring results
It takes time to build rankings and establish an online presence, that’s true. At the same time, SEO is one of the steadiest marketing activities and once your website is optimized, it can keep on continuously bringing results for your business.
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Objection 6: SEO is too technical
Some aspect of SEO are indeed technical, affecting how a website is built and optimized. The majority of SEO work however focuses on strict marketing activities –finding keywords to target, creating content that attracts visitors from search and pushes them down your funnel, monitoring keyword rankings, and analyzing traffic data.
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Objection 7: SEO requires to change a lot on my website
This one is actually true. You may have to tweak or even rework your website ot achieve its full SEO potential. Any of those changes however are necessary and will contribute to achieving your SEO goals.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2014/08/19/7-objections-against-seo-and-why-they-arent-true/