SEO: The Pros and Cons

As with anything we do in life, there are Pros and Cons to weigh when it comes to your SEO efforts. There’s a lot to consider, and a lot of what you decide will be a personal decision for your business. There are so many places that we, as small business owners, can dedicate our time and energy, and there is a limited amount of money and time available!

In this article, I’m going to describe some of what I see as the Pros and Cons of Search Engine Optimization, and hopefully this will allow you to decide what you’d like to do to make your search results even better.

Pro: It’s Free

I rank high on the Google Search Results for Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer, and I haven’t paid a dime to get there! I get phone calls all the time from Search Engine “Companies” and Google asking me if I’d like to “…rank higher in the Google Search Results“, but these are simply advertisements for ME to pay for advertising.

Utilizing great SEO techniques is free, as long as you know what you’re doing! Putting in the time and energy is well-worth it, because nothing will truly come out of your bank account. It’s a great way to find new clients without having to fork over money to get them in your “virtual front door”

Con: It Takes Time

So, it may be free, but the “cost” of great SEO and ranking is your time. With each post or page you dedicate your efforts to, there is time and effort involved. There is a whole checklist of items to work on for each post, and once you’ve mastered the learning curve of these things it does get easier, but at first it can take some time.

Additional “time” on the SEO efforts? Simply ranking on Google can take time to move up the rankings, as Google crawls your content and sees more social proof that it’s great content to read. That means that you might have to wait a while to see the results, but again – it’s free!

Pro: It’s easy to learn

Great SEO techniques are actually very easy to learn, so you don’t have to have an engineering degree to figure out how it all works together! There are proven pieces of content that you’ll need, and specific things you’ll need to do, but it’s all absolutely do-able for anyone!

Con: There is TONS of information to weed through

So it’s easy to learn, right?! YES! But – the down side – there is TONS of information to learn and filter through in order to actually learn which pieces are important, and which ones aren’t. On top of that, Google’s algorithm changes, and so you’ll want to make sure that you stay on top of their recent adjustments, OR – learn from someone who already reads through all of the technical details and shares the juicy parts with you.

My take? All Pros

I have learned so much about SEO in the past few years, but now that I know how it works it’s an absolutely wonderful form of marketing for my business. Just yesterday I got a phone call from a guy who wanted to propose and have me photograph it “because he saw my ad on Google” – which means, my “Proposal Photography” website popped up first when he was searching. Talk about easy business!