SEO isn't right for every business. And I say that as someone who's been doing SEO for 17 years. And when I say SEO, I'm including AI or GEO or whatever you want to call it.
What I typically tell business owners is it makes sense to start investing in SEO when you're doing about a million a year in revenue. Now, that's a simplification. Of course, there are many exceptions.
I talk about why SEO is generally not worth the money when you're below that mark and why you're effectively printing money when you're above that mark.
Do we see it? SEO is pretty simple and it comes down to two things, authority and content. For SEO to work, you have to show up in a search engine.
And that's still true with AI, it's just that it's AI using the search engine instead of a human. To show up in a search engine, you need enough authority to rank for the given search term. More competitive search terms require more authority.
And you need content that's relevant to that search term. And then in AI search, the AI also needs to trust the content enough to cite it. But that's still just a matter of authority and content.
Now, authority isn't actually just a single measurement. It's the number of factors being measured together. In the early days of Google, it was almost entirely determined by backlinks.
What other websites are linking to your website? Today, backlinks still matter, but search engines like Google have become much more sophisticated. Other factors are now equally as important.
Things like how many people are searching for your brand by name; or when someone performs a search, how likely are they to click on your website in the search results; how often are you getting reviews on the sites that Google trusts; and how prominently are you mentioned online. And every year, Google's algorithm gets a little better at understanding what natural authority looks like. And a little better at detecting when someone's just gaming the system by, say, buying a ton of backlinks.
But here's the thing. If you're already doing over a million a year in revenue, you probably already have a lot of natural authority. Before you do any SEO.
For businesses like this, you almost certainly have the authority to rank for hundreds of keywords that you're not yet ranking for. You just don't have content targeting those keywords. And content is the easy part for SEO agencies like ours.
Now, SEO agencies can help you build authority, and there's a few things we do for our clients in that direction. But there are real limitations.
In 90, maybe 95% of situations where an SEO agency is trying to aggressively build authority, starting from very little authority and trying to get you competitive, you're wasting your money at best, and at worst, it's going to backfire. Google knows what natural authority looks like and they know what aggressive link building looks like. So if you're a newer company and you haven't yet built much authority in Google, I recommend doing things that will naturally build your authority.
Create content on social media, consider running ads on social media, get more reviews on the sites that Google trusts, and reach out to existing relationships or partners that might be willing to mention you or link to you from their website. But if you're an established business and you have authority and you haven't done SEO yet, you should definitely consider doing SEO.
