Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO

Search Engine Optimization
Analogies: Similar to public relations (for you marketing folks). Can be compared to "buying" search engine traffic.

ADVANTAGES

We do work upfront, and then, for the most part, we're done. The changes we make today will probably still be driving traffic to your site a year from now. Over time, SEO is usually less costly than PPC. In fact, it can be free of charge after the upfront work is done. There's a credibility factor, since the site is listed in the engines' editorial results. This is a sort of third party endorsement savvy searchers know that the site didn't buy their way in, so the ranking is viewed as "earned." Some searchers skip over sponsored listings and only pay attention to editorial results. Broad coverage on all search engines worldwide. In theory, if you have an optimized site with links pointing to it on other sites, every search engine out there should be able to find and index your site. You may get traffic from search engines you've never heard of.

DISADVANTAGES

We must make changes to your web site. Normally, this is easy to do, and the changes are usually transparent to visitors. However, if you have invested heavily in a search engine-unfriendly site, you may not want to implement workarounds to make it more welcoming to engines. Or if your copy went through six rounds of committee and attorney approvals, changing it may not be an option. Results (rankings, traffic) sometimes start slowly, though they do build over time. Usually, within 3-4 months of submitting the site, rankings get about as high as they'll be. There's no guarantee as to results. We can't predict how many rankings we'll get for a particular search term or engine; nor can we predict how much traffic we'll get. We are limited as to the number of search terms we can target by the number of web pages we have to optimize, since we don't want to optimize any web page for more than one or two terms apiece.