SEO Limitations

• SEO has a greater up-front cost because to do it effectively you may need to redesign the web site. For example; re-structure the site, change text to increase keyword density, add additional pages to your site, create or ad links to other sites, create a mirror site, etc.
• The ROI for SEO is negatively affected by the fact that it can take 1-3 months to see results, but you must pay up front, and probably every month after that to insure the campaign is maintained properly.
• SEO, when done right, can be very time consuming because more and more, relevance and therefore page rank, is determined by link popularity. Ethical link popularity is achieved by a laborious process of negotiating reciprocals links with other webmasters. This requires significant time to identify similar, yet non-competitive web sites, writing or calling the webmaster and formally agreeing to swap links. Then following up to insure they have placed the link as agreed. Most proficient SEO technicians believe that building a successful link popularity element of an SEM campaign should only be done if you are unable to achieve your desired keyword positions through other traditional SEO means.
• SEO has on-going costs because the search engine algorithms are always changing and the competition is not standing still. Someone must regularly check to confirm you are maintaining the desired position for each important keyword, and if not, make appropriate enhancements.
• SEO, when done using methods forbidden by search engines such as cloaking or doorway pages can result in having your site permanently banned. An unassuming web site owner could have their site, and in essence their brand, banned from a search engine. Google specifically warns against these practices.
• It may be realistically impossible to secure a top position (1-5) or even on the first page of search results for your most valuable keyword phrases, the ones that would produce the best results or what is known as conversion rate. Competitors with deeper pockets can afford to spend more on the work required to hold those top positions, leaving you to work with second rate keywords.
• Even with the best tools and using the best ethical techniques, it is not reasonable to expect to be able to optimize any single page for more than 5-10 keywords and some experts claim they only shoot for 3-5 keywords. If you are a small business with a small web site, you are severely limited on the number of keywords you can optimize for, unless you undertake a site re-design which only escalates the overall cost.
• You don’t optimize a “site” for a keyword; you optimize a “page”. That means that if you want to have a searcher deposited to your web site’s home page when they click on your link in the search results, then all your efforts must be done to optimize your home page or mirror images of it!
• The search results from an organic search (the results that are produced from SEO) contain text which is often sub-optimal from a marketing perspective. Searchers often see sentence fragments with less than compelling text.
• In direct marketing, testing and feedback are crucial. Because of the way SEO is done, it can take months to change the text seen by a searcher. In addition, it can take equally as long to ad, delete or change a keyword in your campaign.
• If your keyword research is flawed or your business changes, you could be back at square one.
• In order to gather data to determine how effective your campaign is, especially when you want to analyze data down to the keywords level, it requires that you purchase an additional third party product or service which only ads to the overall cost.