When To Use & When Not To Use SEO (2024)

Will Williamson

08-Sep-2022 09:00:00

When To Use & When Not To Use SEO (1)

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is a modern online marketing strategy with the aim of improving organic search engine rankings. This means appearing on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!

When To Use & When Not To Use SEO (2)

SEO combines both technical techniques and creative visual content to drive traffic to your website and to increase overall brand awareness.

The internet is everywhere we look, no matter how hard you try, there truly is no escaping it. As a result of this, if you are a business owner you should learn to embrace the epidemic in which studies have shown can be the making or the breaking of a successful company. According to wordstream.com, 80% of the traffic generated for any website will be from search engines. Therefore if an SEO campaign is not carried out well, your site will be buried within thousands of other search results, decreasing the visibility and traffic enormously.

Key SEO Elements

On Page:

  • Content – Content is the most important element to an SEO strategy as it provides all of the essential but at the same time, interesting information to the customer. This can be general website text, images, blog articles and videos, for example.
  • Keywords – Keywords are terms closely connected to the product or service you provide in which will help your website to be found more easily on search engines when customers search for those particular key phrases.
  • Meta Tags – The Meta tags include a Meta title, Meta keywords and a Meta description, all in which contribute to your SEO strategy. These are displayed in the SERPs (search engine results page.)

Off Page:

  • Backlinks – Backlinks are pretty much the digital version of word of mouth marketing. They are links from other websites that link back to your website.
  • Social Media – Social media is a brilliant way for businesses to interact with their customers, promote products or a service, and to constantly be sharing relevant, up to date content.
  • Online Directories – Presence on online directories can bring many new customers to your website and help improve overall link building.

When To Use SEO

SEO should be used when you wish to get to the top of the search engine and/or to remain at the top. This is not something that happens overnight, it requires an SEO strategy that uses many key elements in order to achieve this. However, when you've achieved this, you can enjoy long lasting benefits.

Another good time to implement an SEO strategy is if you are building an authority website. This is an information site for a particular niche. Once it gets going, it will be the type of site that often generates traffic through just URL recall, and the only SEO element relevant here will be clever, informative content.

If you are looking to increase the value of your website with the intention of selling it, then an SEO strategy would be a great way to do this. Increasing the value of your website will allow you to sell it for a much higher price as I'm sure you would wish to. A consistent flow of traffic to your website, and ranking highly on search engines will increase the value massively. These things are achieved through successful SEO.

When Not To Use SEO

If your business provides a made up product or a new invention, SEO is not really the marketing route for you. Not yet anyway! If nobody has heard of it, then no one will search for it. For products or a service that is simply just that bit too far fetched for SEO, a more appropriate marketing solution would be a PR campaign in order for customers to firstly be introduced to your business' goods.

If the product or service you provide is in low demand, therefore your keywords are not being searched for, unfortunately this is confirmation that SEO is not the marketing technique for your company right now. This doesn't mean it never will be though!

Apologies for being the bearer of bad news, but if you are in need of instant results, SEO will not create those for you. As much as we would all love that, it is just not feasible. Despite this, if you are to look at the bigger picture, SEO can grant you much more and benefit your company in much greater ways than any instant success. Slowly and gradually are the verbs that spring to mind when discussing the increased value of a brand.

If you're not willing to commit with both time and financial investment, there won't be such a thing as a successful SEO campaign for you I'm afraid! Examples of commitment are regular social media interaction and creating and publishing up to date website content. However, just because you don't have the time, doesn't mean a professional expert digital marketing company can't give you a helping hand. For any specialist advice and further information visit: www.jdrgroup.co.uk

Here are a few other articles that maybe of interest to you:

  • Are You Breaking These 6 SEO Cardinal Sins?
  • SEO For Google 2012-2017: What Has Changed? What Remains the Same?
  • What Are The Best SEO Techniques In 2017?

Hopefully this article on when, and when not to implement an SEO campaign has been a great help to you and your business. If you have any queries, please comment below or call us on 01332 343281 for an informal chat.

When To Use & When Not To Use SEO (3)

Inbound Marketing (SEO, PPC, Social Media, Video)

When To Use & When Not To Use SEO (2024)

FAQs

When To Use & When Not To Use SEO? ›

The use of an ampersand is something I would recommend using in the meta title tag and content headlines. With regards to the meta title tag, using an ampersand can be helpful from an SEO aspect because it is shorter than the full word and can be used to create a higher response title.

When should you not use SEO? ›

When your business doesn't need SEO
  1. You require fast results. ...
  2. You operate on a tight budget or limited resources. ...
  3. You face low demand for your product or service. ...
  4. You are not concerned about outranking your competitors. ...
  5. Your target market does not use search engines.
Sep 11, 2023

Can you use the & symbol in SEO? ›

Using the "&" symbol in a page title is generally acceptable and not considered bad SEO practice. Search engines can understand and index titles with "&" properly. However, it's essential to use it when it's grammatically correct and adds value to the title's readability and user experience.

Does Google read ampersands? ›

Answers to your questions: Yes, google can and does read ampersands and plusses and does show slightly different results depending on which you use.

Is it unnecessary to use SEO? ›

Creating SEO-friendly content, on the other hand, is not always necessary. Besides your company name, you don't really need to rank for any other keywords. Although SEO has been a great way for us and our clients to increase website traffic and sales, it definitely isn't the only way.

Will SEO become obsolete? ›

These developments introduce new challenges and opportunities for optimization, making it clear that SEO is far from obsolete—it's just entering a new phase of adaptability and integration.

What words should I avoid for SEO? ›

This includes words like a, an, the, and, it, for, or, but, in, my, your, our, and their. When people search for something online, search engines like Google omit these words in their results because they don't relate to the keywords in the search.

When should I use the & symbol? ›

What is an ampersand? An ampersand (&) is a typographical symbol that is rarely used in formal writing. It is read aloud as the word and and is used as a substitute for that word in informal writing and in the names of products or businesses.

Can you use the & symbol in a website? ›

No. Unfortunately you can't use ampersands (&) as part of your domain name. Characters that you can use in your domain name include letters, numbers and hyphens.

Can you have an ampersand in a website address? ›

You can't use an ampersand in a domain. Companies use “and” in their domains instead or they decide to skip it at all. In some cases, they use a hyphen instead.

Is the ampersand safe in HTML? ›

The question mark and ampersand might be dangerous because they are used to pass parameters to an application over an URL. The ampersand is also a problem because html entities can be encoded with it ( ä produces 'ä').

Why can't Google read symbols? ›

Put another way, we filter out symbols. There is a lot of crap represented by Unicode; generally we only index, and thus you can only search for, alphanumeric characters.

Can a screen reader read an ampersand? ›

If you need the typographical symbols to be read out loud explicitly, of the 91 symbols tested, the only “safe” symbols to use across all screen readers tested in their default configurations are these 17: @ (the at symbol) & (ampersand, written either as & or & in the markup)

What is the biggest problem with SEO? ›

To recap, here are the most common SEO issues:
  • High keyword competition or low volume.
  • Algorithm updates.
  • Slow page speed.
  • Low local ranking.
  • Pages not indexing.
  • Resource constraints.
Feb 23, 2024

Why is SEO so hard? ›

One of the things about learning SEO that can be challenging is the amount of information you need to read and process. You need to become familiar with powerful tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Moz, which involves a lot of reading and practice.

How many businesses don t use SEO? ›

2022 Small Business SEO Findings:

Here are the 2022 trends found by our team: Almost half of small businesses (47%) are not currently investing in SEO. In 2021, over a quarter of small businesses (27%) began investing in SEO and twenty-five percent (25%) plan to in 2022.

Are there any disadvantages of SEO? ›

Here are some cons to SEO strategies: Results Are Not Instantaneous – You need patience and wait for the SEO to take effect. Search engine ranking and indexing can take anywhere from hours to weeks to do. RPIs Are Not Quick Either – Returns on investments do not show up the next day.

Which of these is a bad SEO practice? ›

However, it's important to avoid bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing, duplicate content, hidden text and links, and paid links, as they can harm your website's visibility and lead to penalties.

What is a bad SEO signal for a website? ›

Bad SEO is any practice that hurts your rankings, provides a poor user experience (UX), or goes against Google's guidelines. These are often outdated SEO practices. But bad SEO can also be accidental. Like your site having lots of duplicate content you didn't know about.

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