A large number of businesses think that having a website alone is going to be enough to achieve success online, only to realize a bit down the line that it’s not like that. Having a website is something essential but, having a website that is SEO optimized is crucial in today’s age.

The problem is that most businesses have the wrong approach when it comes to SEO, seeing it as a cost rather than as a long-term investment. SEO basically refers to the process of optimizing your site and your content to rank higher in Google searches, amongst other things. You can read more about this in our Introduction to SEO article.

Because we consider that investing money in SEO is crucial we prepared a few reasons that back up our claim, and hopefully change the way people think about this digital marketing element.

Organic Traffic Is the Most Important

For a business, traffic is still traffic regardless if it’s organic or bought, as long as it results in enough conversions to cover the costs. Even if paid traffic can play an important role in the short-term scaling of your business, in the long run, businesses will benefit more from SEO.

Businesses often enjoy spending more money on ads than on SEO because they can analyze the results of their campaigns, and easily determinate the return on investment. However, it’s harder to track down the results generated by your SEO investments since it’s difficult to attribute the organic traffic growth and the conversions generated by it, to SEO alone.

Considering that the most amount of searches and generated traffic are made through organic ways, now it is more important than ever to put money into SEO. In order to get paid traffic constantly, you have to keep on buying ads. Years from now, if you stop buying ads your traffic will stop coming as well.

However, and this is the best part about SEO, if you invest resources into it constantly, years from now you will be able to get the same amount of traffic you’re getting now from ads, organically.

It helps to think of the two channels as different kinds of spending. Advertising behaves like rent: you pay every month for the space, and the moment you stop paying, somebody else moves in. SEO behaves more like renovation, because the work stays with the property. A page that has earned its position keeps working at night, at weekends, and during the quarters when the marketing budget is frozen.

There is a second argument that gets mentioned less often. Paid search is an auction, and the price of a click is set by whoever else is bidding on the same keyword. As a market gets more crowded, that price tends to move up rather than down, so the same budget buys fewer visits each year. Organic positions do not behave that way. They are earned once and then defended, and defending a strong page usually costs far less than building it did.

None of this means advertising is wasted money. Google Ads is still the fastest way to test whether a message converts, to validate a keyword before you commit months of content work to it, and to cover the gap while your organic pages mature. The mistake is treating the two as alternatives instead of as two instruments playing at different tempos.

SEO Increases Brand Credibility

The goal of any entrepreneur is to grow the authority of his business, and establish it as trusted as possible in the eyes of the consumers. Building such authority in a niche often takes a long time but, it’s going to end up being highly rewarding in the end.

Being perceived as a credible source on the internet can bring you many benefits. One of the most effective ways of doing that is through SEO. All of the other digital optimizations and promotional campaigns will end up being less effective without a solid investment in SEO.

A website that is ranked organically at the top of the search results will inspire more trust in users. That is important because, as shown in our SEO Abbreviations explained article, the first two ranking position get about half of all the clicks generated from organic searches.

Thus, being at the top of the SERPs will not only make your brand feel more credible in the eyes of people but, it will also bring you more traffic and eventually organic conversions.

Credibility is also, increasingly, what the search engines themselves are trying to measure. Google’s public guidance to its quality raters is built around experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, the framework usually shortened to E-E-A-T. It is not a switch anyone can flip, but it describes what the ranking systems are attempting to approximate. In practice it means showing who wrote a page and why they are qualified to write it, publishing a real address and real contact details, keeping claims specific enough to be checked, and being mentioned by sites a human would recognise as reputable.

The stakes rose again when AI-generated answers moved onto the results page. Google’s AI Overviews and assistant-style tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot summarise the web and cite a small handful of sources. Those sources overlap heavily with the pages that already rank well and that state things clearly and verifiably. A business with no organic footprint is therefore not only missing from the classic blue links; it is also missing from the summary sitting above them, and from the answer a potential customer receives without ever scrolling a results page at all.

What You Are Actually Paying For

Part of the reason SEO gets filed under “cost” is that it sounds abstract. It is much easier to approve an invoice for something you can point at. So it is worth breaking the work into the areas that any competent programme covers, because each one produces something concrete you can inspect.

Technical SEO. Crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data and page speed. The deliverable is a site that search engines can read completely and quickly. Core Web Vitals belong here: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness (it replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024) and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
Content and on-page work. Matching each page to the intent behind a query, covering the subject properly instead of thinly, and writing titles and headings that describe what is actually on the page. The deliverable is a set of pages that answer a question better than the ones currently ranking for it.
Off-page and digital PR. Earning links and mentions from sites that already carry weight in your market. The deliverable is a referring-domain profile that grows steadily and would look reasonable to a human reviewer, not a spreadsheet of purchased placements.
Entity and local signals. A consistent business name, address and phone number wherever they appear, a claimed and complete Google Business Profile, and schema markup that tells search engines what kind of organisation you are. The deliverable is a business that is recognisable as an entity, not just a collection of URLs.
Measurement. Google Search Console for how search sees you, GA4 for what visitors do once they arrive, and a rank tracker for the keyword set you decided to compete on. The deliverable is a report where every number can be traced back to a source.

SEO and Paid Search, Side by Side

The comparison below is deliberately qualitative. The exact numbers depend on your market, your margins and how competitive your keywords are, but the shape of the trade-off is the same almost everywhere.

What you are comparing	Paid search (Google Ads)	SEO
Time to first results	Hours to days	Usually months
What happens when you stop	Traffic stops the same day	Traffic decays slowly, often over quarters
How cost behaves over time	Paid per click, set by auction, tends to rise as competition grows	Front-loaded, and the cost per visit falls as pages mature
Attribution	Direct and simple to report	Indirect, needs Search Console and GA4 read together
Speed of testing a message	Excellent, headlines can be tested in a day	Slow, changes must be recrawled and re-ranked
Effect on perceived trust	Clearly labelled as an ad	Read as an editorial result
Best used for	Launches, promotions, seasonal peaks, validating demand	Compounding demand capture, credibility, defensible positions

Businesses that get this right usually run both, and let each one do what it is good at. Ads answer the question “does this offer convert?” in a fortnight. SEO answers the question “will we still be findable in three years?” and no amount of budget makes it answer faster.

A Realistic First 90 Days

If you have never invested in SEO before, the first quarter should be about removing obstacles and choosing a direction, not about publishing as much as possible. A sensible sequence looks like this.

Days 1 to 30: audit and baseline

Verify the site in Google Search Console and confirm GA4 is recording sessions, conversions and channel data correctly. If the measurement is wrong, everything after this is guesswork.
Crawl the whole site and list every page that returns an error, redirects more than once, or is blocked from indexing.
Compare the pages you want indexed with the pages that actually are, using the Pages report in Search Console.
Write down a baseline: impressions, clicks, average position, number of indexed pages, referring domains, and the conversions you care about.
Agree internally what one enquiry or one sale is worth. Without that figure, no SEO report can ever be judged.

Days 31 to 60: fix and structure

Clear the technical blockers first. There is no point promoting a page that search engines cannot reach or that loads badly on a mid-range phone.
Map keywords to pages, one primary intent per page, and merge or redirect the pages that are competing with each other for the same query.
Rewrite title tags and meta descriptions for the pages that already get impressions but few clicks. This is usually the fastest visible win available.
Improve internal linking so that your most commercially important pages are reachable in two or three clicks from the homepage.
Work through Core Web Vitals, paying particular attention to Interaction to Next Paint, which usually exposes heavy scripts and bloated third-party tags.

Days 61 to 90: publish and earn

Publish or substantially rewrite the handful of pages that sit closest to revenue, the service and product pages, before worrying about the blog.
Add the supporting content that answers the questions buyers ask before they are ready to buy, and link it to the commercial pages.
Start earning links deliberately: original data, useful tools, partnerships, industry commentary, and the relationships you already have with suppliers and clients.
Review Search Console every two weeks and record what changed on the site, so that later movements can be explained rather than guessed at.

How to Tell Whether It Is Working

The objection raised earlier in this article, that SEO results are hard to attribute, is fair. It is a measurement problem, though, not a law of nature. The trick is to stop looking for one number and instead watch three groups of signals that arrive at different times.

Early signals, roughly weeks two to eight. Pages indexed, crawl errors falling, impressions in Search Console, and average position for the keyword set you mapped.
Middle signals, roughly months two to six. Clicks, click-through rate at a given position, non-branded impressions, and referring domains gained.
Late signals, roughly months four to twelve. Organic sessions in GA4, assisted and last-click conversions, qualified leads or revenue attributed to organic, and the volume of people searching for your brand name directly.

A worked example shows how to frame the arithmetic without pretending to a precision nobody has. Suppose one commercial page settles at 400 organic sessions a month and converts at 2 percent. That is eight enquiries. If one enquiry in four becomes a customer, and an average customer is worth 600 euro to you, the page is contributing about 1,200 euro a month. Now compare that with two other figures: what those 400 clicks would have cost at your own average cost per click in Google Ads, and what the page cost to research, write and promote once. Every number in that example is a placeholder, so replace them with yours. The point is the structure, because it turns “SEO is hard to measure” into a spreadsheet people can argue about productively.

Two habits keep the reporting honest. Separate branded queries from non-branded ones, otherwise a successful ad campaign or a PR mention will make your SEO look better than it is. And compare like periods year over year rather than month over month, because most markets are seasonal and a January-to-February drop often says nothing about your work at all.

When SEO Is Not the Right First Investment

An agency that says SEO is always the answer is selling rather than advising. There are situations where the same money does more good somewhere else first.

You need revenue this quarter to survive. SEO compounds, but it does not rescue. Paid channels and direct sales buy the time that SEO then repays.
Nobody is searching for what you sell yet. Genuinely new categories have no search demand to capture. Create the demand first, then use SEO to catch it once people start looking for it by name.
The offer does not convert. Sending more traffic to a page that fails to convert simply multiplies an existing problem, and does it at a higher cost.
A rebuild or migration is imminent. Do the SEO work as part of the migration plan instead of optimising pages that are about to be replaced, and keep the redirect map in the project scope from day one.
Your payback window is shorter than the channel. If the business cannot wait two or three quarters for a return, be honest about that before signing anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does SEO take to produce results?

Technical fixes and title rewrites on a site that already has some authority can show up within weeks. Competitive commercial rankings usually take two to three quarters or longer, and a brand new domain takes longer still. Anyone promising a specific position by a specific date is guessing, since Google itself is clear that nobody can guarantee rankings.

Does SEO still matter now that AI answers questions directly?

It matters differently, and arguably more. AI answers are assembled from web pages and they cite a small number of them. To be one of those sources you need the same things ranking has always required: pages that are crawlable, subject matter covered properly, and a brand that other credible sites reference. What changes is the reporting, because some of the value now shows up as visibility and citations rather than as a click.

Do we have to publish content constantly?

No. Coverage and quality beat volume. One page that fully answers a commercial question is worth more than ten thin ones on adjacent topics, and updating an existing page that already ranks on the second results page is often a better use of a day than writing something new from scratch.

Can we do SEO in-house?

Much of it, yes, provided somebody owns it, has real access to the site rather than only to the CMS editor, and has time reserved for it every week. The parts where outside help usually pays for itself are the initial technical audit, competitive keyword strategy, and earning links, because all three depend on experience and relationships that take years to build internally.

Is link building still safe?

Links remain one of the strongest signals in search, so the question is not whether to earn them but how. Editorially given links from relevant, genuinely visited sites are the goal. Bulk placements on link networks are treated as a spam policy violation by Google and are a poor use of a budget even when they briefly appear to work.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEM is the umbrella term for getting visibility in search, and paid search sits inside it, while SEO is the organic half of the same job. The two share a keyword universe and should share a strategy. Our SEO abbreviations article unpacks that vocabulary in more detail, and the Introduction to SEO guide covers how the organic side fits together.

Conclusion

In order for a business to grow and generate more conversions, whatever that might mean, it needs both, established credibility online but also enough of traffic. Both of these things can be bought, in the short term through SEM or other advertisement methods but, in the long run, SEO is one of the few things that can acquire them.

If one shift in thinking is worth taking away from all of this, it is the one from the beginning of the article. SEO is not a line item to be approved reluctantly every month, it is an asset that is being built. Budgets get cut, campaigns get paused, agencies get changed. A page that has earned its position keeps working through all of it, and that is the honest reason businesses need SEO: it is the only channel where the money spent today can still be earning three years from now.

Why Businesses Need SEO