Do You Need SEO, or Do You Just Need More Clients?

Introduction

Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show. It's Jules here. So I thought I'd give it a go going live in the community and recording my podcast in here. I always used to record my podcast live and I stopped doing it when I stopped using my Facebook group so much. But now I've got the Success Without Socials community, which is off of social media. So I thought I'd come and record live in here.

So annoyingly, I'm just popping in because I realised after I'd recorded this whole episode that it wasn't actually recording in the community. So I am really sorry. I'm glad I did record it on my phone as well, because otherwise I would've had nothing to share with you. But I'm sorry it's not quite up to the usual audio quality of the podcast. I hope it doesn't detract from your enjoyment of it.

So if you are not part of the community, please do come and join us. You can find the link on my website and I'll pop it in the show notes. The community is very new, it's not a big noisy community and it's deliberately designed that way. It's not designed to be something that's just going to keep interrupting your day. I want you to help me decide what you want in there as well. It's called Success Without Socials, and it's all about connecting with like-minded business owners who are also looking to grow their business with less reliance on social media and paid ads. So come and join us in the community and I'd love to see you there.

So today I'm going to talk about whether your business needs SEO, and the honest question really of whether SEO is worth it and whether it's something that you should invest in in your business. This is a conversation I've had more and more as my business has evolved. I'm much more aware of this now, when clients are coming in and when people are booking discovery calls, I am much more aware of whether SEO is the right thing for them right now. And there are definitely some questions you can ask yourself about your business and your business model, and about whether now is the right time, or whether it's right for you to do SEO at all.

For most businesses, I think SEO could definitely benefit. That's the overarching thing, but it's not always the right time for it. And it's not the fastest way to get clients. So I'm just going to dive into that today and give you my thoughts, and you can then make your own decision on whether you think SEO is right for you. If you decide it is, then great. I can certainly help you with that, and help you with making it a little bit easier. That process of actually getting your SEO working for you, getting your website bringing you a steady stream of clients, and we can go from there.

Does Your Business Need a Steady Stream of Clients?

One of the first things to consider when you're thinking about whether SEO is right for your business is whether you need a steady stream of clients coming into your business. Do you always need new clients and customers coming in? Will you always need that? For most businesses, that is true. For some businesses it's true to a much greater extent than others.

We've all got to keep marketing our business. It's one of those facts of life that regardless of what type of business we've got, we always have to do some kind of marketing, whether that's through relationship building or through active marketing like posting on socials, or email marketing. There are hundreds of ways we can market our business, but we still have to do it. We've got to continue to spread the word about what we do, how we help people, and what the benefit is to them of working with us.

In case this is your first episode, the first time you've stumbled on this concept of SEO, let's start with a little about what SEO actually is, what it stands for, and what the big benefit of it is.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which fundamentally just means setting up your website so that it shows up in searches on Google, and now in AI search as well, so you get recommended in AI searches. Essentially it's making sure that when people are out there searching for a business like yours, or a solution to their problem, your business is the one that shows up in the search results.

One of the big benefits is that it can keep bringing people into your business, even long after you've done the work. SEO is quite front-loaded. We do lots of work at the beginning and really get everything set up. We start with your core pages, so that the things you sell are the first things you show up for, and then we think about expanding to additional content. But it basically means that when people are searching for what you do, your business continues to show up.

SEO vs Social Media and Ads

Whereas when you're posting on social media, once you've posted and that post has had its run through the algorithm, whatever today's stats are, whether it's hours or minutes, once you stop posting the traffic stops as well. It's the same with ads. As soon as you stop paying for those ads, the traffic stops too.

I think back to my days looking after the website at the salon. Had I known about SEO, it could definitely have helped in the times where we needed more clients. Not as a last-minute "we need a client this week" thing, but it helps to prevent those big peaks and troughs, because you've always got new people finding your business, and existing clients realising you can help them with something else too.

With one-to-one service providers, if you get to a point where you're pretty much fully booked, if you've got a very small team or you're a solopreneur and it's just your diary to fill, then potentially you don't need SEO quite as much. If you get a couple of spaces, the fastest way to fill them is probably to tell your existing clients you've got space for one more, and ask if they know anybody looking for a new stylist or therapist. That way you're not getting a massive influx, and you're not relying on social media.

The biggest immediate pull right now is "I need some clients, I'll go and post to social media." And that can take even longer than SEO if you haven't already built up a strategy. We have that feeling of, if I just post, maybe I'll get some new clients. And maybe you would. But realistically we're dependent on the algorithm even showing our content, and then only a small percentage of our audience see it. You're interrupting people's scroll rather than showing up as a solution when they're searching, and it's just exhausting.

If you just need to fill a few spots in a diary, word of mouth is the fastest way. But if you always need new people coming in, maybe you've got a bigger team where there's more churn, then there's always more demand to fill those appointments. And with the salon, we could always have been selling more products. That was the really scalable thing. If we could have sold more Clarins, we'd have made more profit to reinvest. If we'd had much more SEO in place for the brands we stocked, that would have brought new people in, and that feeds into the appointment books too, someone finds out we sell Clarins, comes in for a facial, then books a haircut or a blow dry. It all feeds into itself.

So if you need people coming into your business steadily, and you always need that steady stream of the right people, it massively helps. It helps you predict how busy you'll be, avoid the feast or famine feeling, plan, grow, and have more money coming in because you're not left with dead slots in the diary or stock sitting on the shelves. And if you have a business where people use your service once or twice and that's a natural end to it, you always need new clients coming in.

If you decide SEO is a good thing for your business, the other thing it can do is make your business stronger and better in general. You still need to be marketing elsewhere too. I always say try to have one active form of marketing and one more passive form. Once you've done the initial work, SEO becomes that passive channel, with leads still coming in long after. You'd just be looking at your stats once a month, spotting opportunities to optimise further and convert more visitors, moving into a maintenance phase where you keep an eye on Google and AI search and look for ways to grow. But new clients don't depend on you doing that, because you've set up that passive channel, whether you're walking the dog, asleep or on the beach.

How SEO Strengthens Your Business and Messaging

As you do this work on your SEO and get your website working for your business, it helps you become clearer on your message, on who your ideal clients are, and on the problems you solve for them. One thing I've seen with clients is that it makes them more confident, because they have to think about the real problems they help with and the ways they're making people's lives better. The majority of the clients I work with are businesses that do make people's lives better, and I love that. If you feel like you're really making a change, it's so powerful for keeping you going on the hard days, because business is hard and working for yourself is hard.

Knowing you're making a difference matters to you as a business owner, but it also helps with all your other marketing. Most businesses still need some active way of marketing, word of mouth, networking, email. Once you're clearer on the problems you solve, who you're trying to attract, and the words those people use, you can carry that through everything.

This is one of the big things I see when I work with clients, one-to-one or in the Website Growth Club, those light bulb moments where we look at what they should be showing up for and often aren't. We look at keywords, at what's already happening in their online presence, and at what they really should be associated with. This is more important than ever with AI search, because AI is looking to recommend experts and to pick up strong trust signals. It helps you understand why you're an expert, and how to use those words across every channel, even down to your one-minute pitch or how you introduce yourself when networking.

There is work to do here, which is part of why SEO feels front-heavy. You have to get clear, and that can be hard and even a bit triggering. We have to start gathering our thoughts somewhere outside our brain, and outside AI as well, because a lot of us are now having regular conversations with AI about our business, and those long chats can end up as just more noise. One of the things Website Growth Club members do is set up an info base: the place where you gather all of that outside your brain and outside your chats with ChatGPT or Claude, so you have a bank of content, ideas and words to draw on for whatever marketing you're doing. It helps you be more organised, more confident in what you're selling, and actually makes it work for you.

Creating Content You Own

One of the fundamental things I believe is that we should create content we own first. Back in episode 139 I talked about how to use your own content to grow without social media, and I talked about it in some early episodes too, episode 9 on why a content strategy is your first step to website success, and episode 2 on why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm and can use your existing content to show up in search.

You own your website. You don't own your social media accounts, you don't own YouTube, you don't own your Substack. But you do own your website, so you're in full control of your messaging there. It should be the hub of your online content, with everything else pointing back to your own domain. As you work on your SEO, your website gets clearer, and you build trust with people before they've ever had contact with you. Your website can either build trust or destroy it.

As you work on your SEO you'll be working on your message clarity and applying it strategically: the structure of your pages, your page titles and descriptions, your headings, the frequently asked questions on your pages, and whether you've got broken links. These aren't necessarily the first things, but over time you'd think about making the most of your images, which can be really strong for local businesses, how you link your content together, and things like page speed, and whether your website is set up to help you moving forward, not just now.

As things change with the algorithm and with AI search, your website is already set up with the fundamentals in place, which makes it much easier to keep up, and things always change. It means you've got the foundations there and your website is set up in a way that works. That becomes an asset for your business. If you've got a website with plenty of traffic, and you link it to an email list and keep in touch, that becomes valuable. A business with a way to keep in touch with its clients, and regular traffic and leads coming in, is a lot more valuable than one that's constantly having to market actively and drag people in kicking and screaming. So you're building an additional asset that works for you now and shows that your business is strong and valuable.

When You Might Not Need SEO

Let's talk about those people who may not need SEO, or for whom it might not be the right time right now. If you only need a few extra clients, and you only ever will, and you can fill a few gaps by word of mouth, then SEO might not necessarily be the strongest marketing route for you. One thing I'd say is that if you're full but you don't have a waiting list, that's where you could get some problems. If you lose a few clients at once and can't fill the gaps last minute, you're a little vulnerable, and that's where new enquiries coming in all the time can help. But if all you need is a few clients, SEO might not be the strongest route.

I do work with people who are aware of that. They get fully booked and don't necessarily always need new clients, but they still want to work on their SEO because they want to show up in their area for what they do, they don't want to use social media, and they're thinking about the future. We can worry that if referrals dry up, the business dries up. But if your business relies one hundred per cent on referrals, that's okay, as long as you keep doing the things that get referrals coming in, still giving good service, still asking people to refer you, still being conscious of your pipeline over the next few months, not just next week. It is okay to not have to constantly market your business.

But if you're in that position and still marketing on social media, what is that actually doing for you? We have this feeling that we've all got to use social media, and I talked about this back in episode 104, you've been sold a lie, smarter ways to be visible without social media. We're told that if we're not on social media, we're failing. But if you're fully booked and pretty much okay with referrals and keeping your pipeline full, then it's okay, you don't have to use social media. That's my big message. Social media is optional, and don't believe the lie that you have to use it all the time.

So if you don't need constant new clients, if you're one hundred per cent dependent on referrals and you're comfortable with that, that's fine, you might not need SEO. But if your business is fully booked and client-based, and you're thinking that somewhere down the line you want to move to something more scalable, selling more products, a one-to-many offer, group programmes, anything that needs more people coming in, then I'd challenge you. Even if you don't need it right now, working on your authority, which is what SEO builds, is something to consider in the background. I work with a lot of people in this situation, moving from one-to-one to more online offers, and if you've built up your SEO and authority around your one-to-one services, and what you move on to is related, that authority is really valuable. The sooner you start, the easier it is to sell when you've got something scalable.

The other group are people who come to me thinking they need SEO but really they need clients right now, maybe they're early on, or they've lost some regular clients and they're in a panic, and they don't want to be on social media, or they've tried it and hated it. They hear SEO can bring a steady stream of clients, which it absolutely can, but it's not the fastest way to do that. For me, those relationships are the fastest way to bring you new clients. So forget social media, forget SEO for now.

When to Start Thinking Long-Term

If you need clients next week, you need to be talking to the people you know about what you do. Ideally you'll have built some relationships already, so you're not trying to sell with no pennies in the jar to take out. But even just your existing network, friends, business acquaintances, people you see regularly, will have built up a little trust in you. They want to help, they understand you, and they know you'll be reliable if they tell people about what you do. That's probably the fastest way to get new clients right away.

This is often the point where people tip into thinking long term. If you've had a panic about not having clients and you solve it by getting the word out, it still leaves that nagging doubt: I don't want to be in this situation again in three months or a year. That's where starting to think about SEO, and getting something working in the background, means you don't panic when a couple of clients leave or a contract ends. But if you're looking for clients this week, SEO isn't going to bring you that.

That said, it can work quite quickly, and definitely faster than social media, especially if you're a location-based business with a Google Business Profile you're not making the most of, that's one place you can get quick wins. And with AI search it can happen a lot faster. Before, we'd wait for Google to crawl and re-index, and there's still about a three-month lag on that. I had this recently with a client who had a botched website migration and realised three months later her organic traffic had flatlined. We did a power hour together, she went off and fixed some of the fundamental things, and a couple of months after that her traffic came back up to where it was, even though she'd moved to another platform, so there were no guarantees. Focusing on the most important things first helped her recover.

So there's a lag on Google and organic search while we wait for it to crawl our sites. Whereas with AI search it can be straight away, because it crawls what's happening on the internet right now. I had this on my own business when I did a flash sale on my SEO for podcast course. The sale finished on the Friday, and on the Monday I was running the sales page through ChatGPT to see what I could improve for next time. As far as I knew I'd changed everything on the page, but ChatGPT came back and said it could see I had 50 per cent off. I couldn't work out where, and it turned out it had crawled through and seen a post I'd done on the Friday on my Instagram. So it's that fast. If you make changes, the AI bots crawling your website in real time can pick them up quickly, which is a great thing, because it means we can see results straight away.

When we think about SEO, we're thinking about work that pays dividends in 3, 6, 9, 12 months and beyond. So if you want to still be in business in 12 months and onwards, thinking about your SEO now, and getting changes in place that help with search, conversions and clarity, is worth it. It even helps if you depend on referrals: when people are referred to you and go through to your website, having worked on your SEO, messaging and clarity makes them more likely to convert. So it's not a quick fix, and I don't class it as one, but it can have faster results than social media and other forms of marketing, and it's continual results that keep happening. The goal is that you get to a point where you're not marketing all the time, so you can free up time to grow your business, scale it, or take more time for what you want outside of it. Imagine taking social media off the table, or taking away that big chunk of marketing you always have to do. What would that free up, in mental clarity, peace of mind and business growth? That's why SEO is so important.

No Time or Budget for SEO?

There's probably one other reason SEO might not be right for your business right now, and that's if you don't have any time or budget for it. If you've literally got no time, and none you could take from somewhere else, it's worth looking at where your time is going. If you're marketing through social media and it's not working, or you're spending a lot of time scrolling because you're on the platform and caught in the algorithm, which is set up to keep us there. I talked about this back in episode 105, why your brain and business deserves a break from harmful social media, where I talked about how the platforms are built on the same algorithms as gaming apps. They're designed to keep you there, they make you feel like crap so you go back, and they're addictive, rewiring your brain to keep you on the platform.

So if you've no time for SEO, think about how much time you're actually spending on your phone or desktop, on social media or in general, where those little snippets of time are stealing your attention. If you can claw some of that back and spend it on the asset you own, your website and SEO, and on growing a longer-term marketing strategy, then great.

If you genuinely have none of that, no time to find and no budget, and by budget I mean a decent one, because paying someone else to do your SEO needs a good budget, then I'd still challenge you. If you don't have any time, you're very vulnerable outsourcing, because you or someone in your business needs to be involved in the strategy. I talked about this a couple of episodes ago, in episode 142, before you pay someone to do SEO. I work this way with clients because I think you need to understand what you're outsourcing, whether to an agency or to AI, which is even the bigger danger at the moment. There's a strong argument for understanding the basics before you outsource.

So be really cautious about outsourcing if you have no time, or budget but no time. SEO does need some time, you need to put the work in. Even if someone else handles getting it onto your website, the strategy, what you want to show up for, what you want to be known for, what you should be seen as the expert in, you need to do that part as the business owner. So ask whether you can do SEO, but also think about the cost of not doing it. What's the long-term cost of not finding some time and budget for this?

Key Takeaways and Wrap Up

I hope this has been helpful and has given you some ideas of why SEO might be right for your business, or maybe might not. One of the key takeaways is that SEO is building an asset for your own business, and once it's set up it keeps working even while you're not out there marketing. That's the big thing. And it connects with people when they're searching. We're not trying to interrupt people's scroll, or their day, or their inbox. People are out there searching for what you do, for businesses like yours, for a solution to their problem, and if we can position you as that solution, they're already so much further along the buyer's journey.

So if you're on the fence, SEO is a really strong way to market your business and to make your life easier. Marketing can be really hard, and it's something we all need to be doing, so what can we do to make it easier for ourselves? I hope that's given you some food for thought on whether SEO is right for your business.

If you'd like to grow your business without social media, please come and join my community, Success Without Socials. I'll leave the link in the show notes, or you can find details on my website, thewebsitesuccesshub.com. Come and join us. It's full of like-minded business owners who are growing their business without social media, because social media is optional. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I'll see you soon. Bye.