Not every business needs SEO
Digital marketing professionals on LinkedIn, Lunchclub and similar websites will make you think SEO is an essential investment for every business. After all, when someone says they “did some research” on a product or service, that often includes using Google.
However, the reality is – not every business needs SEO.
At least in the traditional sense.
What is traditional SEO?
Traditional SEO is concerned with ranking higher in Google for generic searches related to a product or service – in other words, appearing when people haven’t yet formed a brand preference.
The thinking is that, by appearing at this stage, a business can help shape that preference. This will then lead to a halo effect of people searching for the brand, which is when people are likely to convert.
A simplified model of how people search at the stages of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion would look like this (borrowed from my article on PensionBee):
This is not a journey people follow linearly, and of course search does not exist in a vacuum.
Social media, friends and family and offline ads can help usher a new customer along this journey. Things also change slightly if a business is a reseller, where the brand stocked may exist in all three stages. But the basics remain.
A lot of keyword tools will delineate terms thus:
This is a fine approach, too, but my worry is that it biases people to focus too much on Commercial and Transactional terms, while underselling the need to analyse branded searches as ‘Navigational’.
Branded searches are extremely important for conversions and Google does its best to blur the extent to which they are. Simply stating that you “should rank for your own brand” or “this could be a big source of traffic if your brand is well known” is a bit blinkered.
Yes, unless you’ve been penalised by Google for doing something shady, you should be the number 1 result for your brand. But for many, if not most sites, branded searches are responsible for the lion’s share of conversions. Analysing this data is important.
If you have access to your website’s click data in Google Search Console, you will see a mixture of generic and branded terms bringing in traffic. Other search engines matter, too, but in most western countries, Google is the biggest search engine by far.
There’s no ideal ratio of branded vs. generic traffic, as it depends on total search traffic numbers. For example, Gymshark, one of the best-known athleisure brands in the world, has a low ratio of generic traffic, but this reflects a strong brand, not weak generic rankings.
Their site gets much branded traffic as a halo of strong efforts in social media, not only from their own accounts, but also influencers and fans. Despite a low ratio of generic traffic, they are still on page 1 of Google for high-volume, broad terms like “gym leggings” in major markets like the USA.
SEO is already dead, really
Being able to accurately determine which terms a user typed into Google to find your site and the subsequent actions taken has not been possible for over a decade. In 2011, Google announced that it would stop providing this data out of privacy concerns.
This means if you go into your analytics software to try to understand which terms a user typed in to convert on your site, you have no real oversight. Most will show up as (not provided).
If you use Google Analytics and Google Search Console, the best you can do is to connect the two tools.
For UA3, the outgoing version of Google Analytics, this will allow you to analyse landing pages to see queries that brought in traffic with rankings, but no way of filtering terms for conversions.
For GA4, the new version of Google Analytics, this will allow you to analyse landing pages to EITHER see queries that brought in traffic with rankings OR event and conversion metrics, but critically not both together.
This means you can’t get data on which terms moved the needle. You simply know that organic search converted from a mix of generic and branded queries.
One would assume that branded converted better, but that should be a given. Someone looking for a brand is closer to deciding to buying or taking another action. But, what about those who converted from generic searches? It does happen, especially for resellers. And which generic terms were the ones that kept people on the site longer?
Google won’t let you get that data.
Even if you try the different attribution models in GA4 or other analytics software at your disposal, it will only say that organic search was part of the user’s journey, but with no understanding of which terms were used.
And thus, the impact of SEO can be very hard to accurately measure. Organic traffic converted? Ok, but what type of traffic? Which terms? And how do you know that this isn’t branded traffic that came off the back of offline campaigns? How do you know this isn’t returning visitors from social media campaigns you ran earlier in the year? How do you know changes aren’t influenced by macroeconomic trends shifting interest in your industry or business?
You don’t. You simply have to guess.
And just pointing towards SEO success of better rankings and traffic from your efforts will often be met with “and what did that do?” from your stakeholders.
Naturally, Google will readily pass on click data to you for paid traffic. Oh yes. If you connect your Google Ads and Analytics accounts, you can get this data at a keyword level, no bother. Suffice it to say, removing keywords from organic search was less about privacy and more about forcing businesses to pay for query data.
It’s why people working in SEO, especially in-house, spend an exorbitant amount of time singing for their supper. There are numerous articles posted online on how to make a business case for SEO, how to keep stakeholders happy in accepting the timeline for results and so on.
Here are a few examples:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/enterprise-seo-buy-in/444852/
https://searchengineland.com/seo-education-stakeholder-management-428068
This takes time away from the very intensive task of doing SEO well and is usually something staff working on other channels – paid, social media and e-mail – don’t have to.
There’re no extensive changes required to make on your site to show your ads to your audience. Once a budget has been set, the campaign can be set up and optimised. By the end of the reporting period, a clear, linear relationship between the spend and sessions can be used to create a report. If using Google Ads, you can even see the terms used!
With SEO, the changes you make can take months to be fully realised and they may not actually do much. Going from page 5 to page 3 for targeted keywords is a significant improvement, just not enough to translate into an uplift in clicks.
Once you understand this, you will understand why many large corporations spend a lot more on paid traffic and very little on SEO, which has failed to get off the ground after numerous attempts.
It can be eye-watering to see a business spend literally millions of pounds on paid search a year when their organic search efforts amount to a handful of staff sending around slide packs that go nowhere. Imagine the content development that could have been!
Businesses want results that can be easily measured in a short time frame. Telling stakeholders to invest in organic search with no legitimate guarantees of success when you can’t even prove which terms you’ll improve conversions from is not fun. Believe me.
There are tools out there that say they can help you uncover (not provided) data, but in the end, it’s mostly hot air. It also requires paying for yet another piece of software that your employer may not have the budget for.
What you really want – to see which terms provided traffic and the user metrics, including conversion for the landing pages – is consigned to the ash heap of the Golden Age of SEO (2003-2011).
But perhaps it’s not really a big deal for you?
While it may seem like businesses who don’t invest in SEO are making a fatal mistake, it may surprise you to learn that in many of those cases, it’s not a big deal.
I have worked with quite a few businesses to improve their SEO that didn’t understand it wasn’t actually all that important.
They wanted someone to help with their SEO because, well, people use Google, right? And they could see that organic traffic was a big source of conversions. So, it stood to reason that they wanted more organic traffic, without understanding the difference between branded and generic queries.
Once employed, I started digging deeper into the data, understanding more about the business itself, the business model and the particular industry. It filled me with no joy to realise that, in their case, generic search traffic had very little measurable impact on acquisition.
This will be very individual to a particular business, but there are many that don’t need or will be able to apply traditional SEO successfully to their marketing mix.
Here are some broad strokes scenarios that I’ve encountered:
Lack of financial impact
Unless generic search can provably make a big financial impact, it will struggle to get off the ground. Getting more generic traffic can be immensely difficult, but… then what?
For example, if your business is b2b2c, the relationship with resellers could be the biggest source of revenue by far. Improving rankings could be of little significance compared to eliminating API errors and improving retailer relationships. The impact of 3,000 extra clicks from generic searches each month is therefore more of a nice-to-have and SEO efforts will be under-resourced.
For an SEO professional, it might be natural to think “we need to improve rankings!”, but if the company is financially successful, even traded on the FTSE100/NASDAQ and not very visible in Google for generic searches, what does that say about its importance?
Not on page 1? Well, massive profits have been recorded, stakeholders are happy and the C-Suite is getting massive bonuses. SEO is really a set of vanity metrics for the business.
People, Processes and Platforms
If you have a largely static website that needs a lot of stakeholder oversight and onerous processes to create and publish content, that will make things very difficult for SEO professionals. Businesses that are genuinely successful in SEO are able to publish and iterate on content with great velocity. Taking 3 months to update some page title and meta description tags will simply not do.
In this case, it really isn’t going to be worth investing in SEO. Sure, some change is better than none, but between Google’s algorithm updates and active competitors, the changes will never be enough to make an impact. You might win some small battles, but you will never win the war.
If your hosting platform and CMS are slow, that’s bad news for your SEO efforts. The truly game changing act of shedding both for something better and using a content delivery network to increase site speed may simply be out of scope for the next 5-10 years. And while I truly think SEO needs to be thought of in those timelines, it’s not anything senior stakeholders want to hear.
Whenever I’ve encountered a business that uses a CMS I’ve never heard of, I always assume the site runs like a three-legged dog. And thus far, I’ve not been wrong.
If you’re in the ‘Other’ slice, good luck.
Customer profiling
If you are only interested in a certain type of customer, it may mean investing in generic search is really not worth your time. Google shows results based on the intent of someone searching, rather than the demographics of the searcher. So, if you have a very narrow definition of who you would like to click on your site, you’re out of luck.
Google doesn’t show organic results just to those you want, they show them to everyone that searches. And that may result in a low number of relevant customers finding you through the broader, high volume, less specific terms that senior stakeholders want you to rank the site for. In this case, social media (including LinkedIn) and e-mail, is probably going to play a much bigger part of your marketing mix than organic search. And that’s fine.
Google used to do a bigger degree of personalisation of search results, but it recently confirmed that it no longer does. When you perform a search, you may see some personalisation based on your location, device, language or recent search history, but in general, there’s not much.
Business model flaws
Sometimes the business idea itself is simply not in place. While at an agency, we had a client that sold seafood, which they had up to that point mainly sold through supermarkets.
They wanted to start selling this online directly to customers hosting dinner parties, and were fixated on broad terms like “smoked salmon”, with no appreciation for how difficult it would be to rank for these terms on the limited budget they had.
They also didn’t seem to appreciate that some of the top results in Google were the exact supermarkets people could buy their products from.
I wanted to tell them they really didn’t need to focus on generic search and instead would be better of focusing on improving their UX and site speed for potential business customers.
The supermarkets already had much of the market tied up online and, from a practical perspective I couldn’t understand why any of their target customers would bother getting orders from them when supermarkets already have good delivery networks in place.
Supermarkets were effectively a vertical search engine for seafood and it made sense that Google ranked them prominently over individual businesses. Someone searching “smoked salmon” is better served by a supermarket or other reseller than an individual business. They want a broad result to narrow their selection.
Not to mention that those in their target demographic who buy groceries in person could simply add their products to their regular shopping when their hosting occasion arose. Seafood is handled well by the refrigeration in supermarkets, so there’s not the same need for freshness as, say, coffee.
The quality in coffee improves greatly if it can be bought directly from a roaster, due to the shorter supply chain. Coffee is most delicious about a week to four weeks after roasting, which is quite rare to find in UK supermarkets. I’ve seen coffee that’s 3 to 6 months past roast date locally! No thank you. Hence why the direct-to-consumer coffee roaster market is thriving and quite competitive. Coffee can also be shipped in letterbox-friendly packaging for fuss-free delivery without the need for someone to be in to sign for it, unlike a big line insulated box of seafood.
Needless to say, the seafood client did not achieve the levels of success they had been mis-sold by the agency owner.
Macroeconomic trends
There could also be a shrinking market for your product online. During the 2020-2022 lockdowns in the UK, people’s searching and buying habits changed drastically. Some of these remain, but some reverted to pre-lockdown behaviour.
One area that saw an increase in search interest during lockdowns was gym equipment, as public gyms were forced to shut for long periods and operate under restrictive rules after.
Companies like Mirafit, Primal Strength and Strength Shop were overwhelmed by people buying equipment that would normally be bought by commercial, rather than home gyms, completely selling out certain product lines.
But now? Most people who have a home gym setup as a result of this time period may buy additional bits and bobs, but the demand for equipment has shrunk and returned to near pre-lockdown levels.
Public gyms exist for reason.
What this means is that generic traffic will be less valuable and in lesser volume than it was in recent history. And that means organic search is less important for driving sales than other channels, such as athlete and organisation sponsorships, social media and partnerships with gym chains and universities.
Shifts in interest for your product may not be as sudden and obvious as a global pandemic, so it’s very important for those working in SEO to pay attention to sources like national statistics, media consumption reports, Google Trends and so on.
But Google!
That’s not to say that for any business, generic traffic can’t help create awareness, but how much can you measure that? And how much do your senior stakeholders really care? If you’re new to digital and work for a big organisation, you may be surprised to learn how little C-suite executives and other senior staff give a damn about your organic visibility in Semrush.
Unless it makes a quantifiable, significant financial impact in the short run, most don’t care.
Organic traffic isn’t always from SEO efforts
This leads into an article by Avinash Kaushik discussing the difference between attribution modelling and incrementality. It’s an excellent article and I strongly recommend you read it.
On the face of it, you might be forgiven for looking at your GA account and think “oh, wow, organic traffic is the biggest converting source! We should invest more here!”.
Oh, sweet summer child.
As already established, those conversions are very likely to be mostly branded and a statistically significant portion of those are likely to be the halo of other marketing efforts – social, paid, e-mail, offline and so on.
It’s why your website’s homepage is often one of the top landing pages for conversions. These people didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to give you all their money. They likely made this as a final visit where they searched for your brand, landed on your homepage and navigated to the section they wanted.
These conversions may be greatly independent of where you rank for generic terms.
I interviewed a few years ago for a role with a company offering bulk e-mail services to businesses. The interviewer said that this would be an important role, because “organic is our top conversion source”. When I looked at their website in Semrush, it said they receive 80% branded traffic, with few meaningful generic terms.
As I didn’t proceed to the next stage, I didn’t get the chance to learn more about this belief around organic search. I would be interested to know if the business was even aware of the difference between generic and branded traffic and how well they were able to accurately measure how much both contribute to conversions.
You don’t need TikTok? You may not need SEO
Not every business needs every channel, and that includes generic search.
Let me give you some actual, real world examples of businesses thriving without active SEO.
My friend Chris runs a wristwatch company called NTH. It is massively successful as a direct-to-consumer brand and I became aware of them through influencers on YouTube. Their Nacken model went viral in 2018 and I bought the watch from a local reseller. Since, Chris and I have become good friends.
He told me that they don’t really care about SEO. Most of their sales come through influencers reviewing their watches on Instagram, YouTube and WatchTok as well as forums like watchuseek and reddit. He said they don’t get any business from people searching “automatic watch” or “mechanical watch” on Google. They do have someone going through their site to make sure there are no blockers to it being indexed, but that’s about it. Appearing for the term “NTH” and individual models in Google requires no active investment beyond that.
My friend Marco is a painter and decorator, who runs his own business as a side-hustle to his main employment with the local council. He doesn’t have a website or even Google Maps listings. He gets all his work through word of mouth. He’s currently so busy, he is considering quitting his dayjob to do it full-time and is booked for months in advance.
Why exactly would he even need a website? At some point, I can acquiesce that a Google Maps listing would be good and maybe some social media accounts, but traditional SEO is not worth his time.
My friend Martin is a PT who has a website, but focuses more on social media and offline marketing. He gets most of his clients, which he trains in person, from his SoMe accounts and the cards/screens at his gym that display his services. He has a Google Maps listing, which ranks well for local PT searches due to its central location and longstanding history, but his website doesn’t feature in Google’s results much in traditional blue link rankings.
That doesn’t mean the site isn’t useful. The site has a contact form, prices and static content, which includes pictures and video of the gym layout. But in terms of traditional rankings? It’s not doing much, but his business is very successful.
And these are just some examples of businesses that don’t really need to worry about their website ranking well for generic searches. Social media, Google/Apple Maps and word of mouth are much more important than traditional SERP listings for many businesses. The assumption that you need Google traffic from generic searches isn’t always right.
Heck, as I detailed in my SEO agency article, I once interviewed for an agency who wanted me to do a case study on their site for a practical presentation. It was poorly optimised, which is typical of agencies, who spend more time on their clients’ sites than their own. When I asked why they hadn’t done a bit more, they said “oh, it’s a political thing. We don’t really need it for new clients anyway, we get most of our business through word of mouth”
Excuse me? You want me to help get SEO clients when you don’t even care about it? It’d be like selling Bibles written by atheists. No thanks.
Thinking that you HAVE TO care about generic search traffic is like thinking you HAVE TO care about TikTok. Many businesses that do not target Gen Z with b2c products in fashion, hospitality, etc can probably appreciate that they don’t need to be on TikTok. At least not for now. It might be nice, but it’s not necessary to reach their right audience. That could change in future, but for now, it’s a pass.
There are also numerous articles popping up online, discussing the fact that many users are no longer happy with Google results after SEO professionals have done their job well. This article by the New Yorker shows how people are prone to using the suffix “reddit” to their Google searches to get credible, user generated content when they want to research a product or service.
The reason they don’t go straight to reddit is that the on-site search function isn’t good enough. So, being the top result in Google isn’t quite as credible as it once was in some people’s eyes.
Google itself is even at risk of being displaced in a big way thanks to AI. Many people want to just ask Chat-GPT a question to get answers instead of doing the grunt work of research and analysis. This is why Bing and Google have started incorporating AI into their own results, essentially a smart version of the Knowledge Graph.
What then, for your SEO efforts? The value will blur even further as your content is blended together with other sources to give searchers an answer.
The Golden Age of SEO has come and gone
When I first started in SEO in September 2007, the first iPhone was just about to launch. Close to 100% of all Google traffic was on a desktop, with Blackberrys and other smartphones very rudimentary and mainly for business execs to check their e-mails on the go.
IG, TikTok and other popular social media networks that are integral for businesses today didn’t exist. Its forebears like MySpace and bebo did, but their adoption rates pale in comparison. People couldn’t keep them in their pocket throughout the day. Even YouTube was a lot more basic and influencers weren’t able to effortlessly review products in 4K.
It stands to reason that Google and Yahoo, comparatively, played a bigger role in people’s decision making when they were researching products and services for a need they had.
Even the use of search engines was different, from search patterns to results. At the time, it was much more common to use simple hero term queries, e.g. “flights to NYC”, rather than more specific, lower search volume searches, e.g. “when are flights from London to NYC the cheapest?”. This meant that, if we could push rankings for a hero term onto page 1, the impact of that was greater.
The SERPs were less busy, with no knowledge graph, People Also Ask accordions and other features that result in “zero click” searches, where Google gives a user the answer without referring them onto a site.
The audience was markedly more captive.
Not to mention, the ability to manipulate Google’s results fast and affordably was greater. I got my start in SEO pumping out links for clients through directory listings and articles that few, if any, humans would ever see. We could literally turn rankings around for a site in a matter of months or just weeks, if we were lucky, through mindless, simple link building.
This was also highly profitable for agencies. In my case, the agency I worked for would charge a client £600ish for an article posted to 30 sites. I would be expected to copy and paste these articles to about 30 sites in about 1-2 hours, which, based on my annual salary would be about £7-15 per article. The article itself would cost about £15 to write, as we gave most of that work to freelance writers and paid them about that much. So that’s £570 of profit per article (minus overheads). We’d usually have a client sign up to anywhere between 10 to 30 articles a month, meaning that’s £5,700-17,100 of profit per client per month.
The profit margin on directory listings was great, too. I forget what we charged per client for a listing, but let’s say it was about £20 per listing. We would usually take our book of clients in a spreadsheet and approach a directory owner to list all of them at a discount. I seem to recall we had about 300 clients, so that’d be £6,000 per directory in terms of revenue and we would usually negotiate a very small fee from the directory owner (usually a few hundred pounds), who in many cases were based in Asia and other parts of the world, with no care or diligence about what went on their sites. They’d pretty much just created these directories to get revenue from Western companies like us.
Google did put an end to all of this in 2011 with the Penguin and Panda updates, but for a glorious time period, let’s say 2003-2011, you really could invest in SEO and be rewarded in a big way.
You could also see which terms were actually bringing people to the site and understand which ones resulted in good user metrics, like bounce rate, time spent on page, etc.
What a time to be alive.
The State of Play of SEO Today
Today, Google’s rankings can be very hard to manipulate, requiring hard graft over a long period of time with no guarantees of generic search traffic that converts well.
If you’re starting from scratch, or close to it, the chances of SEO success could be slim to none in the short timeframe most businesses think.
When SEO gurus flex about results, they can be guilty of doing so with relatively immature niches, that is to say businesses that are relatively new, with few dominating incumbents.
During the pandemic lockdowns, I used Google and IG to find meal prep companies local to me. Most had popped up very recently as chefs were furloughed and restaurants had to pivot their efforts. Their websites quickly rose to page 1 of Google for local meal prep searches. Sadly, many closed down once restrictions eased off and people were comfortable going into supermarkets to buy their own ingredients for healthy meals.
This is the Semrush organic traffic graph for my favourite local meal prep company, Knockout Meals. Their food is simply delicious and I used them for a long while. You’ll notice that their organic traffic has dropped off. That’s not because rankings have, it’s because demand has. The business is thriving and has even opened a café to sell their food.
Now, could anyone hope to replicate their success if they were working in a mature niche?
Absolutely not.
How do I define a mature niche?
It’s an industry that has a long history of people searching for information and buying products online, with Google being one of the main entry points. Some examples of this could be travel and hospitality, personal finance and home improvement.
The keyword difficulty scores of third-party tools like Semrush and Ahrefs should be relatively high, though in practice, they can give a false read.
For example, looking at Semrush, it gives a keyword difficulty score of 45 (out of 100) for the term “pension transfer”, which means it’s moderately difficult to rank well for. In reality, it’s nearly impossible to get to page 1 for this term and outrank the top incumbents on content alone.
The government’s websites get preferential treatment due to the sensitive nature of pensions and especially transfers, which means switching provider. Google classifies searches that can impact a user’s long-term health and finance as YMYL, or Your Money or Your Life. Because it knows that many implicitly trust its results and don’t think they may be manipulated, it’s decided that it needs to show credible and impartial results on page 1 for YMYL queries.
Pensions falls under this. No matter how good your website is, you will never outrank the governments websites for the most popular pension terms. It doesn’t even matter if your content is written in a way that has a lower Fleisch-Kincaid readability score or includes more up-to-date information and examples. Google has so decreed.
A mature niche is one where SEO professionals have helped alter the landscape of search results, either through agencies or in-house. A very common set-up is to keep strategic functions in-house, with agencies providing tactical skills for tasks that are more labour intensive, such as link building. Done well and sustainably, link building requires a lot of effort and is usually better outsourced for cost and speed efficiencies.
In many mature industries, the websites that dominate SERPS are over 20 years old, started around the time of the dotcom boom. The head start they have is essentially insurmountable. Even if you start pushing hard to improve rankings, there’s simply too much of a gap to outrank them in a meaningful way.
Sorry, it’s just the reality of it. Not only are they very far ahead, but they’re not just sitting around. Chances are, they are working hard to maintain their position.
Going back to pension transfers, the top pension providers behind the government websites are Aviva and Legal & General, businesses that have invested in SEO for decades, with domains dating back to the late 1990s.
To think that “pension transfers” is a moderately difficult term to rank for that simply needs “well-structured and unique content” is plain wrong.
It’s also naïve and somewhat disrespectful to think a new website deserves to rank on page 1 in a mature niche fast. It’d be like being a university graduate and applying for a C-suite job at a blue-chip organisation. What makes you think you deserve to leapfrog all the people who have devoted more time to this field than you’ve been alive?
Every business has a performance ceiling and so does every website in Google. If you started SEO over 20 years ago, meaning you should have a full-scale SEO team by now, you might have a chance of going from the fifth-most visible to the most visible site in search rankings. But if you’re just starting, you won’t leapfrog the 20-30 sites ahead of you.
And no business I know of has senior staff that would accept improved Google rankings two decades from now. Most want rankings in two years, preferably two months.
So SEO is pointless?
SEO is not pointless, but its importance and successful application varies greatly from business to business.
For example, LEGO has an SEO team. Their traffic is 96.4% branded. They are not on page 1 for “plastic brick toys” in the UK. Do you think the care?
Absolutely not.
The SEO team is more than likely focused on page performance, matching landing pages with branded queries and ensuring index bloat doesn’t become an issue.
I would implore businesses in a similar, but less world-famous scenario to follow suit. Focus on existing branded traffic first, then worry about generic traffic.
In other words, when people search for branded “buy” or “contact” or “login” queries that are commercial or navigational in nature, what is the number 1 result they see? When they land on that page, what are the blockers for taking the desired action? Is the page too slow? Is the page too long? A review of the page’s Core Web Vitals will be a good place to start.
While keyword tools can tell you what the public want to know about a particular topic and should be used to guide the content strategy for both potential and existing customers, the entitlement to high search rankings has got to stop and that as a goal has to be judged realistically.
You should be creating content for your users first, search engines second. And that may mean creating high-quality, relevant content informed by search demand with no realistic chance of being on page 1 of Google. But that content could be what helps a potential customer to keep you in mind when they want to make a choice of vendor. It could be what assures an existing customer that your business is a trustworthy thought leader in your industry. Don’t just view every page as an entry point from search engines.
For businesses that operate locally, I would greatly recommend Google/Apple Maps and social media listings. These offer a more personal and less fussy way of creating a digital footprint that is easily found.
If there’s an immediate need to drive business, Google Ads can be a great way to get generic traffic until organic traffic picks up. It can also be a waste of money. Testing and learning will be the best way to understand this.
Beyond that, treat Google, Bing and Chat-GPT as frenemies. They don’t owe you anything and will likely scrape your content and show it to your target audience without referring it on to you. But you really have no choice.
Do the best you can with what you have and try to enjoy the process.
Thanks for reading and I will catch you in the next one.