5 Situations When SEO is NOT Necessary for Your Site

Travis McAshanSEM
Feb 2010

In most situations, optimizing your website to be found online seems like an obvious company goal, but in reality, this is not always the case. In my experience, I’ve found there are a couple of situations where an SEO campaign is simply unnecessary.

1. You DON’T want your website to be found

There are some unique cases where having strangers visit your website will do no good for your business model. For example, if you have an online training tool for your specific employees or an online classroom tool for your students. Overall, this is a specific situation where it’s best to spend your resources in other areas.

2. Your site is already ranking extremely well

It could be that your in a relatively non-competitive market and you have a large advantage on your competition. You’re site is already ranking rather well, you’re more than happy with your lead volume, and you simply don’t want to fix what isn’t broken. While I salute you, the rest of the web might snub it’s nose at your rather fortunate situation.

3. You’re in a HUGE rush (or are desperate for new leads)

Perhaps you’re in a hurry to close new sales and if you don’t get a certain number of leads and closed sales in the next 30-60 days you’ll have to shut the doors. In this regard you’d be far better off with a quality PPC campaign. The problem with placing expectation and pressure on your SEO is because of the nature of a great SEO campaign. Great SEO is an organic slow-growing beast that becomes more and more powerful as you feed it. However, don’t expect your lion cub to turn into the king of the jungle over night… like all things in life, patience is rewarded.

4. You are going to completely rebuild your website

Over the past couple of years we have had a number of website rebuilds where the company came to us through the referral of an SEO consultancy. In almost every situation, the best approach is to build the new site with great SEO principles, but wait on the actual campaign until the new site is live. As soon as you launch the site a full blown SEO campaign is just what the doctor ordered to take your prize to the next level.

5. You’re developing a new web presence on a test server

This is another one of those unique situations but I had to include it on the list because of how often it’s popped up for us. In the last few years, it seems as if Google has become a voracious beast when it comes to new content. It’s scouring the web constantly looking for links to new pages. If you’re developing a site that you don’t want anyone to see make sure to password protect the server. We have found that “norobots” exclusions, drafted pages in CMS, and many in other situations, Google will FIND a way to your website pages whether you want people there or not. When in doubt about if your page is visible to Google, ask an expert!

Quotable Quote…

“Succeeding is not really a life experience that does much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.”— Michael Eisner, executive

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