If you are confused about whether you want to continue with SEO or not, this blog is the right place to get detailed answers about it.

Hey there, I am Praneeth here.

In this blog, I am going to share the pros and cons of SEO, the pros, and cons of search engine marketing, and the advantages of SEO in detail.

You will learn all these steps with facts and proofs backing my points in this blog.

Make sure to read the blog until the end.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

Pros and cons of SEO.

Let’s make it, the blog is divided into 2 parts.

Pros of SEO.
Cons of SEO.

Lets first discover and understand the advantages of SEO.

Let’s dive right in.

Pros of SEO/advantages of SEO:

In this part, you are going to learn what are the advantages of SEO in detail.

Here is an instant overview of the part.

Free yet consistent traffic to your website.
Seo results often get higher clicks than PPC.
Increase your website’s credibility to users.
A good conversion rate of organic traffic you get.
Increase growth, recognition & visibility of blog.
Increase internet presence and direct traffic to other platforms.

FREE yet CONSISTENT traffic to your website:

This is by far the best profit of Search Engine Optimization you can think of on the internet.

You can’t deny the fact that for the majority of websites on the internet such as,

Neil Patel.
Backlinko.
HuffPost.
Ahrefs.
Lifehack.

You just name them.

This is something that everybody can take huge advantage of SEO.

Be it,

A blogger.
A marketer.
A businessman.

Whoever it be, you can get consistent traffic to your place through search engines without spending a penny on it as long as you are regularly updating the content.

According to a study, around 53% of all website traffic is driven from/by google.

If you optimize your page properly and do SEO correctly and focus more on users than Google and Bing, you are more likely to succeed.

Based on user metrics and other ranking factors that Google uses to rank websites.

With time, you will get a constant and continuous flow of traffic to your place.

It is like a passive source of the traffic to your website or blog from search engines like google and bing.

You neither need to purchase ads or do marketing of your website, if you just focus on SEO properly in the initial days, you will get FREE traffic.

A pro tip here;

The time has gone where keyword stuffing and backlinks were all over the place for higher rankings.

Now, what matters is

Good and high-quality content.
Better click-through rate.
Higher dwell time.
Better user experience.
Less but high-quality relevant backlinks.

Focus on these 5 factors to get higher rankings on google fast.

Just do SEO properly and with time, you will have a constant flow of traffic to your website like a passive income source.

Do yourself a favor, read the ultimate guide to rank brain & save your time, energy on SEO in 2020.

SEO results often get higher clicks than PPC:

This thing is pretty interesting.

There is an ongoing debate over SEO VS SEM [PPC].

Which one is best and which one isn’t.

For your kind information, SEM is search engine marketing, which means that marketing your product or website or service on search engines through showing ads.

PPC is the Pay Per Click which means that you need to pay a certain amount of money to google or that respective search engine when a user clicks your AD.

The fact is that even though most PPC ads are placed higher in rankings in google to respective keywords, they don’t get more clicks often than real SEO results.

Hence, it is an advantage of SEO over PPC that you get more clicks even though PPC results have higher impressions.

Increase your website’s credibility to users:

When your blog/website ranks in top positions of Google for any specific term or keyword in google

That means, Google is trusting you and even your website’s credibility will increase to users because google itself is ranking the blog over others in search results unless you choose PPC which is advertising your service on Google.

Your blog or website will be seen as a more trusted and reliable source of information by people just because your blog is ranking in top positions of Google.

A good conversion rate of Organic traffic you get:

This is another sort of good thing about search engine optimization.

Not only you will get traffic from google or any other search engine through SEO.

The fact is that,

An average organic traffic conversion rate is around 16%.

Because the traffic is organic, there is going to be a better conversion rate on your blog.

Hold on,

It’s not just about organic traffic or traffic, in general, all the time to increase the conversion rate on your blog.

Here are 5 key factors to determine the conversion rate of traffic on the blog.

Search intent of the keyword.
Keyword volume, CPC.
Your blog’s position in google’s top 10 results.
Blog/website reputation.
Content quality.

Depending on these factors you will have better and more sales on your blog or through your blog.

Conversions in the sense more leads and sales, basically more customers from just usual visitors on your blog.

Considering the very fact of traffic you would likely get from google every month if you do SEO properly with a conversion rate of the typical traffic on your blog is pretty massive.

This will help you a lot irrespective of you being a blogger, or marketer, or a businessman.

We all need the traffic to convert it into leads and earn money right.

This is another reason why you should start a blog, well I have written a detailed guide on why blogs are important for SEO and business.

Checkout, why blogs are important for SEO and business in 2020?

Increase growth, recognition & visibility of the blog:

This one for a marketer or a businessman.

If you already have a business company but do not have a blog.

You are probably decreasing your chances of success.

When you start a blog doing SEO properly on it, with time your blog starts ranking on top positions of Google.

If your website meets with all the conditions like

Higher CTR.
Dwell time.
Less bounce rate.
Good user experience
The good reputation of the blog and author for EAT.

Your blog will start ranking on keywords in top positions of Google and not just a single keyword that will drive consistent traffic to your place.

Here is the proof:

Proof:

Here is a keyword blogging mistakes.

The first result in google USA is Hubspot.

Let’s look at it and analyze it in the Moz keyword tool.

This single blog is ranking over 922 different keywords other than blogging mistakes.

Doing SEO properly, You can rank on multiple similar search queries for a single keyword and blog on google.

This thing of ranking for multiple search queries other than your main keyword will enhance the visibility of your brand online.

It is simple.

The more you visible on top of all results in google to users the higher your chances of success get because visibility brings with it other elements such as:

Trust.
Reliability.
Authority and Expertise.

The higher these 3 things have on your website, the better it gets for you, your website, and your business as a whole.

Have you observed, I have been speaking of the reputation of blog, credibility, and trustworthiness kind of things quite a lot in the blog, the reason is to EAT.

EAT is a new update in Google’s algorithm called Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, read more about it here.

Not just that doing SEO will help you a lot in your business.

According to opti n monster:

Companies that blog get twice more traffic and 97% of more links to their business than those which don’t.
57% of marketers have said that they have gained customers through blogging and SEO.
70% of internet consumers prefer knowing about brands through blogs and posts than ads.
60% of consumers buy products after consuming content on the internet.

Increase internet presence and direct traffic to other online platforms:

Look.

This is one of the other benefits of SEO.

When you gain some trust with Google and have some pretty old website ranking on a few keywords.

With time, you can start creating videos.

You can grab the audience and people who don’t read blogs often through videos and vice versa.

But the cool thing is that when you gain some reputation online and trust with Google.

Google is going to promote your other platforms to direct the traffic there.

If you didn’t get that.

Here is an example.

Let’s type a keyword, Neil Patel, for supposing.

In case if you do not know who he is, he is a digital marketing expert, founder of neilpatel.com

Let’s type it in google & bing and see what’s we are going to get.

Ultimately point here is.

Google & bing will direct your traffic to other places where you have a higher online presence to increase engagement there and help you grow, such as:

You-tube.
Twitter.
Instagram.
Linked in.
Facebook.

You can capture a large portion of the audience to your side.

There are a lot of people in the world who might be interested in your niche but don’t like to read blogs to know about it.

You can create videos about it and yeah videos much more powerful than blogs in terms of marketing.

The point to make here is you can leverage your other social media presence and get your traffic to those places and gain engagement and internet presence.

Grow as an online brand as a whole through SEO.

Cons of SEO:

In this part, you are going to learn exactly what are the cons of SEO.

Here is a quick overview of the section.

It takes a lot of energy and time.
It takes at least a year to see the good results of your blog.
Return to investment is slow.
There is no guaranteed of rankings and traffic, it fluctuates.
Income also fluctuates.
Frequent updates and big penalties from Google.

It takes a lot of energy and time:

Look.

The main reason why most people hate SEO is it is not an easy thing to do.

SEO is optimizing your website or blog to search engines like Google and Bing.

The problem here is.

When you think of running a blog, thinking that blog is a piece of cake to handle before starting a blog and regretting later that blogging is not that easy task to do.

It takes a lot of work to keep your blog optimized for search engines.

Such as,

You need to do keyword research.
You need to research your content.
You got to write a highly researched and helpful piece of content.
You got to create good graphics on the post.
You need to outreach and promote your blogs.
You need to build quality backlinks to your blog.
You need to regularly run site audits and check/fix technical errors on your blog.
You gotta keep an eye on your growth and analytics.
You got to build the reputation of your blog online.

You got to do a lot of things other than blogging and SEO to get things in place.

This thing does not matter to those who have been doing SEO since a couple of years or have a team handling the blog.

But.

If you are a Solopreneur like most other bloggers on the internet, you are going to be burned out initially.

The next disadvantage of SEO moves hand in hand with this one.

The reason is very obvious, keep reading to know what it is.

It takes at least a year to see good results on your blog:

Because you worked hard really to keep up with things in place.

You want to see results like.

Good rankings of your blogs on google.
Good traffic from google.
Earnings to get started.

Even I too have thought this way, but it isn’t.

It is the other way around.

Because your website is new and fresh, Google takes time to build trust with your blog.

Here is a study from the search engine journal, which said that rankings of new websites will fluctuate quite a lot in the first year of the website.

This thing is very important to consider.

It is google’s employee saying that rankings of new websites fluctuate a lot.

That is true because it is what is going to happen with new websites with less domain age.

Here are 6 quick factors on why SEO takes time.

Keywords you target in your blogs, like competition.
Quality and quantity of posts on your blog/website.
The reputation of your blog online.
Your blog language and location of the blog.
Quality Backlinks to your website.
User experience on your website.

Even if you do all these things correctly, Google is going to take time to build trust on you/your site.

How to minimize the time for SEO on your website?

The best way to decrease the time of SEO of your blog is to focus on things you have in your control.

Focus on creating high-quality content.
Increase the user experience on your blog.
Target low competition keywords.
Establish to EAT before publishing content.
Promote your blog.

Even if you do all these things correctly, you still got to wait at least a couple of months to build that trust with google and let google do its job rest.

At the end of the day, SEO takes time, you got to be patient.

Remember. Patience is key of success and failure.

Return to investment is very slow.

Now that you know SEO takes time.

You will have to wait sometime to get that steady organic traffic to your blog and growth in your google analytics.

Meanwhile, you expect earning money in a hundred dollars every month, placing ads and affiliates but because now you know SEO takes time, the return to investment is also SLOW.

What do I mean by a return to investment here?

Well, I am talking about all those investments you made for SEO your website.

That includes,

Your investment in keyword research tools.
Your money in the PPC campaign.
Hiring freelance writers if you can’t write.
The expense of the graphic design of your blogs.
Your time and energy in learning things.

All these things come under your basic investments which you need to do in blogging.

Even if you invest a lot of money in all these investments every month.

You still don’t get results as soon as you expect it to be.

This thing is pretty similar to SEO taking time for your site.

There is no guaranteed rankings and constant traffic, it fluctuates.

You heard me right.

Even if your domain and website are old for a couple of years, you cannot have a constant rankings position.

Always remember, everybody wants traffic.

To get more traffic, everyone wants to rank in the top 10 positions of Google.

You always need to keep an eye over your competitors, your rankings.

The way everybody whom you outranked in google in rankings analyzes your website.

Similarly, you got to look at what others have done that gave them higher rankings so that you can outrank them and get that traffic to your website.

Here is a table of why each rank on google is crucial in terms of traffic.

TABLE OF RANKINGS AND CLICKS IN GOOGLE.

Position Number of page’s rank in Google.	Organic CTR to that page in that position.
ONE [1].	31.73%
TWO [2].	24.71%
THREE [3].	18.66%
FOUR [4].	13.60%
FIVE [5].	9.51%
SIX [6].	6.23%
SEVEN [7].	4.15%
EIGHT [8].	3.12%
NINE [9].	2.97%
TEN [10].	3.09%

Source: Backlinko.

So what can you do to fix your spot and get your blog in the top 5 positions almost all the time?

How to get top 5 rankings most of the time:

Just stick to basics.

Focus on user experience.
Create extremely useful, actionable content.
Embed videos in your blogs to increase dwell time.
Include emotional words in titles to improve CTR.
Focus on-site navigation, loading speed, eliminate distractions on the blog, etc.

Income also fluctuates:

This is a pretty obvious thing.

If you do not analyze your competitors, analyze their strengths and weakness, reasons why they outranked you, improve them in yours.

How do most people earn money blogging?

Ads.
Affiliate marketing.
Selling courses and Ebooks.
Consultancy and sponsor posts in few cases.
Memberships of blogs.

If you do not have constant traffic to your blog, your income will fluctuate as well.

Do competitors analysis properly, analyze your rankings, and improve your titles for ctr.

The fact is that,

Titles with emotional words included will improve ctr by 434%.

Here are, 28 emotional words you can use in titles to improve the car.

Frequent updates & big penalties from google:

The thing is,

Google frequently adds new updates to its algorithm which it uses to rank 100 pages out of millions of pages in google’s database.

The reason for frequent updates is to safeguard google’s algorithm from being hacked or manipulated for traffic.

Because most people doing SEO majorly relied on Google for traffic to their websites.

When Google itself is constantly changing its algorithm, it gets a little difficult to move around.

SEO is a constantly changing landscape.

Ever heard about something like penguin, panda, hummingbird, rank brain updates in Google algorithm.

Utter the word panda update to marketers and look at their reaction, they will be terrified.

With every new update that takes place in google’s algorithm, people are Terrified.

Google penalizes your website for doing things that go against google’s policy violations such as,

Creating Backlinks from spammy sites.
Leveraging Black hat SEO practices like click baits, keyword stuffing, thin content with lots of ads, and affiliate links.
Tricking Google for higher rankings and more traffic.

What do I mean by Penalty from google?

Google’s penalty is some action taken from a group of people from Google over your website.

The result of the penalty could leave the following circumstances:

Removing your site from Google’s index and database.
Banning your site permanently if you do serious violations.
Dropping your rankings and reducing traffic to your site from google.
Reducing the visibility of your site on Google.
Some action from google will harm your site for a good amount of time.

Each update in google’s algorithm has its reasons and purposes to fulfill.

The penalizing thing from Google is someway good for genuine people who are working for living on google.

Ultimately your site will be penalized if you commit any of the 3 things I mentioned earlier.

Here is a table of the most popular google updates its purpose.

Table of popular Google updates:

S/no.	Update name.	Launch date.	What is the purpose, why should you care about it?
1	Panda.	Feb 24, 2011.	Filter and penalize sites with duplicate, thin, plagiarized content with keyword stuffing involved.
2	Penguin.	April 24, 2012.	Penalize sites with links that look manipulative, spammy, and irrelevant links pointing to websites.
3	Hummingbird.	Aug 22, 2013.	Filter and penalize sites doing keyword stuffing and publishing low-quality content.
4	Pigeon.	July 24, 2014.	Filter sites that don’t do proper on-page and off-page SEO on your blog.
5	Mobile.	April 21, 2015.	Filter and downrank sites on mobile-friendliness, as to continue mobile-first indexing.
6	Rank brain.	Oct 26, 2015..	Filter shallow content and show many relevant results to queries of people in SERPs, and filter sites with poor UX.
7	Possum.	Sept 1, 2016	It is to improve Google’s local search rankings algorithm by using users’ locations to show the results of local businesses in SERPs for users.
8	Fred.	March 8, 2017.	Identify and penalize sites which have the sole purpose of earning through ads and affiliate links in thin, low-quality content

Source: Search engine land.

Here is a guide on what to do if you violate google’s restrictions and not get penalized.

Here are some frequently asked questions regarding the pros and cons of SEO, let’s answer them.

Faqs.

1. Is SEO really worth it?

Ans: Absolutely yes.

Seo is really worth it because,

For free yet consistent traffic.
Targeted and localized traffic.
Help build trust and credibility with users.

Ultimately SEO is worth it.

2. What are the disadvantages of search engines?

Ans: Well I have spoken about it.

The disadvantages are pretty simple.

It is highly competitive, everyone wants to beat and outrank you.
It takes time to get results.
It requires a hell lot of time and dedication to keep going.
If you mess up things without awareness you might get huge penalties.
Frequent updates and changes in algorithm, you need to be flexible and quick.

3. What is SEO?

Ans: If you do not know what SEO basically means.

In simple words, driving quality and quantity of traffic to your website from search engine.

In specific, SEO means search engine optimization.

4. What are the pros and cons of SEO tools?

Ans: Well, it is a pretty broad question, we are talking about tools like ahrefs and semrush isn’t it?

To answer the thing pretty quickly,

Pros are:

Get a better understanding of SEO.
Get new ideas, analyze competitors.
Target better keywords.
Maintain and optimize your website according to SEO.
Remove errors on your site which might hold you back in SEO.

Cons are:

This is pretty well known, the data is nowhere close to what is true.
You might overly estimate things with tools.
You might underestimate things due to numbers in tools.
Tools are misguiding most of the time.

5. What are the pros and cons of PPC?

Ans: Well the answer is :

Pros:

It is pretty quick.
You get instant targeted traffic.
You can run ads in whatever time you want.
You can get that initial boost and growth on your site.

Cons are:

It is quite expensive.
It is like a liability, you need to invest to get that traffic all the time.
It is not a good thing in the long term point of view.

There you go, guys, I have answered all the questions pretty nicely, do let me know if you have any additional queries in the comments section below, I will answer them.

Ending remarks:

There you go, I have answered all the queries and helped you figure out whether you should choose SEO or not.

Just let me know whether you are going to choose SEO or not in the comments section below.

Please share the blog with your friends and other colleagues who are thinking of blogging or SEO.

Remember sharing is caring.

If you are interested, you can read similar blogs like this one.

Thank you for reading the blog until here.

I will catch you next time, till then, Keep learning and keep growing.

Is SEO worth it? 12 Pros and cons of SEO