Does SEO really work?

Unfortunately, yes. We’re often spammed with hundreds of these emails and phone calls too. As a rule of thumb, always remember: a good SEO services provider will never cold-call or cold-mail anybody. With their performance, they have more than enough clientele through word-of-mouth referrals. If someone is calling or emailing you with SEO proposals, odds are that they’re not great providers.

A lot of businesses, especially SMEs, have had bad experiences with SEO (and with practitioners who don’t deliver on the tall promises they make). Part of the problem is the intrinsic value of search; for example, as early as a decade ago, a McKinsey study found that organic search generated approximately an additional $92 billion ($117 billion in 2021 money) per year for retail businesses in the US alone.

At some level, everyone recognises this potential of organic search, including the staunchest SEO sceptics. Ranking prominently in organic search is the gold of the digital marketing world. Much like the gold rush prompted practically anyone with a shovel and at least one hand to fancy themselves prospectors, the organic search rush today has inspired a lot of people with just a laptop and the ability to say “keyword”, to call themselves SEO experts.

The real challenge here is that identifying a good SEO practitioner can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for. Read about choosing a good SEO provider

This is sometimes true, but not always. Often, ranking high on Google is a matter of discovering the suitable topics for your business goals (which isn’t always as apparent as it seems) and crafting the right content. We’ve had customers who’ve found their SEO goals fulfilled as soon as Google indexed their sites – it all depends on your industry and your objectives.

As explained above, depending on your industry and your goals, achieving certain milestones doesn’t necessarily take very long.

More importantly, having a good SEO partner (who actually delivers) takes the stress out of SEO, at which point, it’s better to measure whether the result is worth it, than just to measure how long it takes. A good SEO services provider will help you determine at the outset whether the return-on-investment makes sense for your business.

Not necessarily. We believe that you understand your business better than anyone else, so it makes sense to gain insights from you on your business’s strengths and challenges. But we also intimately understand the demands of running a business. Our briefing process is highly streamlined to be as time efficient as possible, and we always do our own meticulous research, so we can work fairly independently.

That said, you should be suspicious of any SEO practitioner who says that your inputs are not required at all; at the very least, they’re overpromising.

Paid advertising certainly plays an important role in digital marketing. However, a multi-pronged approach that combines push and pull marketing is often superior to a strategy that is overly reliant on any one technique (learn more about this on our SMM and SEM pages). Our experienced planners can help you allocate your budget for the most optimal marketing strategy.

It’s also worth noting that even with paid advertising, Google may not list you at the top of the sponsored links — even if your bid is the highest. To decide the position of each ad, Google uses a ‘quality score’, which factors the quality of your website and landing page, among other things. Consequently, a good SEO strategy also improves the performance of your paid digital marketing (including social media campaigns) with compelling content that helps convert customers.

SEO doesn’t have to be overly complicated. At its essence, it’s a method of demonstrating to Google that your website is relevant to certain searches. Growing the site’s popularity over time will help gain credibility points with Google that your site ought to be ranked high, as so many people are visiting it, and other websites are linking to it.

That said, we realise that the finer points of SEO execution can seem complicated, which is why we’ve provided some (we hope) helpful resources on this page to simplify the subject. If you still find it confusing, don’t worry — understanding SEO is our job. We ensure that we take care of every step, and we provide lucid progress reports with measurable easy-to-understand metrics, every month.