Things That Make You Love and Hate SEO

In the modern world, if you want to succeed, you need to be online; you need a positive, visible online presence. Having a well-crafted internet presence and profile will help people find you, read your work and enlist your services, whether that’s as an eCommerce business, a freelance worker, or a blog writer.

The only problem with this is making sure that these people are able to find your website to begin with, which is where SEO comes into play. SEO is a growing enterprise that more and more companies are deciding to use to help them rank higher on search engines such as Google and achieve greater success by reaching a bigger audience. There are many reasons why you should love using SEO, and many things which can make you hate it, which this article will walk you through below.

Love: SEO provides solutions

If you think about how you use the internet, you will most likely see that your search history is full of questions or problems that you need to find an answer to, and an answer quickly! This fact is true of almost everyone’s searching habits when it comes to the internet. The technique of SEO means that the potential audience of your website can find you in a much easier way as the keywords you use in your website copy and any link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. will help move your site further up the search engine results, rather than any potential customers simply happening upon your company by mere chance.

Love: SEO can help your business grow

Being able to make your mark on something as huge as the world wide web can be extremely difficult, but by using SEO, you can drastically improve your chances of visibility to the people who you want to visit and use your website. SEO can help you obtain a strong online presence so that you can get your company out there and on to the computer screens of targeted customers. The other great thing about SEO in this context is that by building up your online profile coupled, of course, with quality content, you can begin to build up a reputation in your niche, which will lead to establishing a trust with targeted audience and, most importantly, seeing a return on the investments you have made.

Love: Link building is difficult (and this is a good thing)

Back in the day, link building was an easy process. With just a few hundred pounds, you could pay a link farming company to send your website to the top of the search engines quickly. Since 2011, this has changed, as Google introduce Panda updates to make sure quality content is always being put first. This makes the process of link building much harder, but it means that what you are putting out into the internet is good quality content and, when you do begin to climb the rankings, this is a meaningful achievement for you, rather than just the result of some extra cash.

Love: SEO link building is constantly opening doors for your website

One thing that factors into your websites ranking on search engine results pages is the freshness of the linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.. Therefore, it is a combination of both the number of links you have plus how recently they have appeared on the scene. While this does mean you need to be using SEO as an ongoing process, it also means that when you are starting out you have a good chance of making a real mark quickly. The fact that link building is an ongoing process means that there is always something you can do to get the door is always open to you and try and get a leg up in the rankings.

Love: Keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. is easy and efficient

An essential part of a successful SEO campaign is the effective and strategic use of keywords. The way you find out what keywords are needed is through researching the words people will search to find a website such as yours. For example, if you have a website where people can book hotels, your keywords may include things such as holiday, abroad and travel. By simply incorporating these keywords and phrases into the content side of your SEO strategy, this will improve your ranking on search engine results pages by associating yourself the search terms people looking for you will doubtlessly use.

Hate: SEO can take time 

The two main elements of SEO that a good campaign will focus on are on-site and off-site optimisation. The frustration digital marketers feel over these elements is that they take a lot of time!

One particular element of SEO that takes a lot of time is, of course, the onsite optimisation you have to do in order to be successful. To have a user-friendly site that the search engines will look favourably upon, you need to invest a lot of time into making your website right. It needs to include things such as being accessible to search crawlers, options to share the page with social media and be able to be viewed across multiple devices.

The other element of SEO is off-site optimisation, which includes link building and content writing. As mentioned previously, link building is a difficult process and, while this means a high level of quality is ensured, to achieve this takes a lot more time and effort.

Hate: The landscape is in constant flux

SEO works by using the algorithms of search engines to get your website ranking at a higher position, but these algorithms don’t stay the same for long. Search engines like Google are constantly changing the way search results are ordered to ensure that, firstly, no one can cheat the system somehow and, secondly, so that they are providing the best, most up to date results for the terms and questions searched for. This is both a blessing and a curse as the constant changes mean that your website always has a chance of climbing the rankings, but it does also mean that staying there is never a guarantee.

Hate: It is (largely) out of your hands

As mentioned previously, the algorithms are in flux, and part of this means that SEO doesn’t offer a lot of control to you as the website owner, in regard to off-site optimisation. The truth is that only the search engines know exactly what the algorithms are and, as a result, there is no winning formula you can apply to ensure success. When the criteria changes, a website ranking on the first page of results could drop several pages back and beyond the boundaries that most people will bother to look.

Be that as it may, you do have complete authority over you on-site optimisation techniques, which are just as important to building a successful website and getting paying customers to find you. By using all the aspects of SEO, you will find that you can reach a healthy balance between what you can and cannot control with these methods.

Hate: SEO is a big investment

As you have probably already gathered, it takes a lot of link building before you start rising in the rankings. This is even more amplified if you are involved in a highly completive market as getting your name out there among the industry giants is going to take some doing. It means that if you want to see a real return on your investment, you are going to need to invest a lot. Alongside this, to get the on-site element of SEO just right could mean you have to hire an SEO specialist. However, the money spent on a good SEO strategy will be more effective than if it were to be spent on physical marketing, where the reach and return on investment are incredibly low.

Hate: Improvement is an ongoing process

With your own website, you will always have to be looking for how to make it better for every new technology that comes out and every new social media site that takes the world by storm every few years. Coupled with this, the accumulation process of methods such a link building is not something that you could ever say is complete but will go on indefinitely. This being said, if you are a driven, business-oriented person, then you will always be looking to improve your internet presence anyway, so you may as well capitalise on your own ambition by using SEO.

So, as you can see, there is a lot to love about SEO, but it also comes with its fair number of drawbacks. With this being said, the industry would not be growing if it didn’t hold potential for businesses to see real results from it. If you want your website to have better, targeted web traffic, using SEO is the best way to get there, as long as you don’t mind waiting for a while to see the results and the return on your investment come through into the company bank account.