3 Reasons Why SEO Matters to your business

As a small business owner, entrepreneur, course creator, or coach, SEO should be your favorite word for many reasons. The top three reasons why SEO matters are that it’s free, it works, and it has long-lasting results. If you’re not entirely optimizing your website or blog, you are missing out on opportunities to grow your business. And, in today's ever-evolving SEO world, it's important that you remain visible as search shifts to AI-based search. Without traditional SEO on your website, you won't likely show up in places like ChatGPT, and people are searching there. ChatGPT is now the 3rd largest search engine. If you want to future-proof your business, now is the time to start. 

SEO is FREE

 It’s that simple. SEO is free. It’s the traffic you earn based on your rankings in the search results. The higher you rank, the more traffic you get. It’s that simple. SEO requires work, but you don’t pay for the click. You may need to pay for a training course or hire a consultant to assist you. However, in the long run, it’s much more cost-effective than paid advertising channels. If you want to equate SEO efforts to dollars, look up the cost-per-click estimate for any keyword you’re targeting and estimate how much you’re saving by working on that term.

The average click-through rate for positions 1-3 on any search run between 12 and 30%.  For this example, let’s assume 1st position gets 30% of the traffic.

If you’re targeting a term that has 1,000 searches a month and you’re in position #1 and the suggested CPC for the term is $5.00. If you are in position #1, you should receive about 300 visits (30%). Those 300 visits would cost you $1,500 in paid search at an average of $5.00 per click. By focusing on your SEO for that term, you’ve essentially saved $1,500 that you would have needed to spend on paid search to drive the same traffic. And, since it’s SEO, you spent nothing for those clicks.

SEO Works 

When done right, SEO works. SEO matters a lot. When SEO strategies are applied the right way, the results can be fantastic. I’ve had clients drive over a million dollars a month in revenue from their organic traffic. I’ve seen others grow their traffic and revenue by 100% year over year for several years in a row.

Organic traffic is a direct result of your SEO efforts. Maybe your business isn’t big enough to drive a million dollars in revenue in a month, but what would another 10%, 20%, or even 50% increase mean for your business? It’s possible with a well-optimized SEO program. The key is having the knowledge and background to create that type of success. The average fully optimized SEO program drives 30-40% traffic and 20-30% revenue for an ecom website. That can have a considerable impact on the bottom line.

SEO Powers AI Search like ChatGPT, and People Are Searching There

 I was talking to students recently, and one shared that she had received 8 new leads in the past 4 business days from SEO. She'd had 6 from traditional Google searches and two from ChatGPT. She also had a new client sign last week who had ChatGPT help her determine what to search in Google, and then went to Google to look for that service in her town. The way people are searching is changing, and we need to adjust our strategy to keep up. 

SEO Has Long-Lasting Results

While it’s true that your rankings aren’t guaranteed, and you have to look at SEO as an ongoing project, the rewards are long-term. When you build your site’s authority through content or links, you can increase your overall keyword rankings, making it easier to rank for the terms that are the most important to you. It also helps you show up in AI Search, and that's going to be very important moving forward. Consumer search behavior is changing, and people are searching ChatGPT and other AI tools a lot. ChatGPT itself is now the 3rd most popular search engine. 

The effort you put into SEO will drive online visibility, traffic, leads, and sales as long as you continue to create great content and optimize each piece. A blog post or website page that’s well-optimized can rank well in the search engines and drive tons of traffic for years. It takes longer to build success through an SEO program, but the results are long-lasting, too. Would you care if a blog post was two years old if it drove 5,000 visits a month and generated $10,000 in revenue every month? Of course not. Most people would love to have a website that produces traffic and revenue numbers like that month after month. SEO can do that for you. Would you like to have 8 new leads in 4 days for your consulting business? I think most of us would. 

Why Is SEO Skipped or Done Wrong? 

I think many overlook SEO because they don’t fully understand the opportunity. If they do understand, they don’t know how to do SEO the right way. Maybe it seems too technical for some. They’re not sure what a Header Tag is. They don’t know what keyword to choose, which page or blog post. Maybe they're unaware they need a unique Title Tag on every page. It's possible they read a few blog posts but didn’t get the right information. Maybe they tried to do it themselves, but didn’t know what they were doing and made mistakes.

I know many businesses have small budgets, and something like SEO seems like an area that you can handle yourself and save money on. There are lots of videos and blog posts out there, and some of them have correct information, and some don’t. Unfortunately, if you don't know right from wrong, you don't know who to trust for advice.

As a professional SEO, there are so many issues I see with DIY SEO work. People don’t understand how to choose the right keyword or where to use the terms. They don’t follow best practices. Their Title Tags should be Meta Descriptions or Header Tags, or they’re so long they truncate and don’t display what they want. They choose keywords they’ll never rank for or ones that return results that are irrelevant to their audience, or worse, they try to optimize for the same keyword on every single page. If they have both a blog and a website, there’s often a mishmash from a keyword-targeting perspective. This is one area where getting the right information matters.

Why SEO is Better Than Social Media For Your Business

Many small business owners focus heavily on Social Media and build their following on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. They may not even have a website because they don’t know how to create one, or they have one, but there’s almost no information on it, so they direct people back to their social media pages instead. Maybe they want a website but feel they can’t afford to hire someone to build one and don’t know how to do it themselves.

The challenge here is that they’re not building a following in a location they own. They’re borrowing their business platform from the social channel. And what happens when the social channels change their rules or update their algorithm? The business owner could lose access to their page, be shut down, have their organic reach on the social channel drop drastically, or have other problems.

Social media platforms are designed to keep people on them, not direct them to another site. For years, Google (and other search engines) have been the opposite of that, and they were designed to send traffic to our websites. However, they're moving away from that model now and becoming more information engines. While SEO may not yield as much website traffic as it once did, it still is how we get visibility online. Traditional SEO is critical to AI search visibility. Without doing SEO on your website, you won't be as likely to show up in Google's AI Overviews or AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI-powered search tools. You don't want to wait on this if you want to stay visible online. 

What’s Next for SEO?

AI-based search is what's next for SEO. This is the biggest shift I've seen in the industry in over a decade. We need to pay attention because things have changed. SEO isn't dying (even though it's been rumored to be dying for at least the past 15 years). What we need to do now is continue to do traditional SEO for search engines like Google, and then format our content for AI optimization too. People are searching differently, and we need to adjust to keep up. 

Are you Ready to Learn SEO?  

If you’re ready to learn more about SEO today and get started, request a copy of my Beginner's Guide to SEO today and learn what to do.

Final Thoughts on Why SEO Matters To Your Business

• SEO is free
• SEO works 
• SEO is used by AI search engines to understand our content and crawl our sites
• You won't show up on AI search like ChatGPT as easily without doing traditional SEO on your website 
• SEO lasts for a long time, as long as you stay current and update your content. This post was first written in 2017 and has been updated many times. This most recent update is July 2025. SEO keeps going. :)