Is SEO Worth It in 2025? How To Determine the Value of SEO (2025)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategic use of tactics such as site performance and content optimization to improve your website’s online visibility and improve your ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs), potentially driving qualified leads who convert.

However, that’s easier said than done. Is SEO worth it? Are the often complex and intricate strategies worth the effort? We asked our SEO experts to craft a well-rounded answer to help you better understand the nature of search engine optimization, including the associated costs and possible outcomes.

Is SEO Really Worth It?

The short answer is a resounding yes. Here’s why:

Google receives over 5.6 billion searches daily, and search engines process around 2.2 trillion combined searches a year. An estimated 64.4% of the world’s population uses search engines, and roughly 68% of all online experiences start there. These statistics present a great opportunity for businesses to attract leads through search. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should jump right into finding a seasoned SEO agency.

Is SEO worth it for every type of business, especially those that don’t plan on launching large-scale campaigns? To make the right decision, we need to consider three key aspects:

• How much is SEO worth?
• Does your website rank?
• Are customers searching for services and solutions offered by your business?

1. How Much Is SEO Worth?

Technically, SEO is free — you can start by adopting a strategy your competitors use or one you believe will work for you. However, not all strategies can be executed well for free.

For instance, if you need tools for keyword research, you can easily find free options. But if you need link building and technical SEO, you’d need a paid tool. Options range from $20 for basic features and over $1,000 for a complete SEO analysis. Ultimately, the cost of SEO will all depend on your strategy and the range of services and tools you require for the project.

2. Does Your Website Rank?

Can you find your website, brand, or products with a simple Google search? If you can’t find your site even on the second page — where only 0.63% of users look anyway — it’s a sign that your website might benefit from basic SEO.

An SEO consultant company can help you evaluate your website’s overall health and give actionable recommendations regarding on-page, off-page, technical, and local SEO with the help of an SEO audit.

3. Are Customers Searching for Services and Solutions Offered by Your Business?

To determine if SEO services are worth it for your business, start with comprehensive market research for digital marketing. This initial step will help you better understand:

• Where you stand within your industry and how you compare to competitors
• Identify your target audience and gain insights into how they behave online and how they interact with businesses like yours.
• Assess search demand and whether customers are actively searching for your products or similar offers in the market. If there’s demand for your competitors, there’s also a good chance that potential customers are looking for your products, too.

Once you know there’s demand, SEO can help you gain an advantage by outranking them and offering more optimized, expert content that addresses their queries and concerns. Ultimately, this can lead to improved conversions and sales.

How Can SEO Services Benefit Your Business?

Expert marketers consistently rank SEO as one of the most cost-effective channels for lead generation and driving traffic without ongoing ad spend. However, the benefits of SEO go beyond just being cost-effective. Here are some of the many advantages you can gain from comprehensive SEO services:

• Improved online visibility
• More purposeful content marketing
• A more cohesive digital ecosystem
• Improved digital marketing strategy efficiency
• Better site performance

1. Improved Online Visibility

The idea behind SEO is to help your pages rank among the top results when users search for relevant queries. Different types of SEO — such as local, mobile, voice search optimization, and YouTube SEO — address specific aspects of search conditions and elements within your digital ecosystem, including your website, YouTube, and social media channels. All of these strategies work together to make your brand more visible.

In that sense, SEO is more than just about ranking high. It’s also an effective strategy to help you build more familiarity and rapport between your brand and users. SEO promotes your products and services in an organic, often more trustworthy way, which gives users a chance to discover and engage with your business more naturally.

2. More Purposeful Content Marketing

Effective content marketing is driven by SEO, and at the core of SEO is keyword research— it helps you identify phrases relevant to your industry, pinpoint opportunities for content optimization, and above all, give you a better idea of what your potential customers are searching for. This helps you understand their concerns, pain points, desires, and interests, which is crucial to creating a relevant content strategy that addresses factors driving leads and traffic.

Jacob Arsh, Business Development Manager at Onyx8 Digital Agency, says, “There’s no effective content marketing strategy without SEO. High-quality, valuable content may answer all the right questions, but if it gets buried under other, more optimized articles, there’s a good chance that users will never get to read it.”

With Google’s constant algorithm updates and ever-evolving content guidelines, you have to put in the effort to create useful, insightful, and people-first content. This establishes your brand as a go-to resource and professional authority within your industry and helps you gain social proof, which is crucial in increasing conversions and sales.

3. A More Cohesive Digital Ecosystem

Strategies SEO services help you create a more cohesive digital ecosystem by optimizing various platforms and connecting them to ensure your brand is discoverable across channels, driving traffic across the board.

YouTube SEO, for example, improves the visibility of your channel and videos, helping them rank higher both within YouTube search results and Google’s SERP. Similarly, optimized social media pages can make your brand easier to find, and by strategically linking to your website, you can seamlessly drive social traffic directly to your site.

Having a strong backlink profile from relevant sites also signals credibility to both users and Google, directing more traffic to your website. Additionally, a Google My Business profile is quintessential for successful local SEO, as it literally puts your business on the map.

A digital marketing agency can help you build a more cohesive digital ecosystem through SEO and strategic link placement that will maximize the chances of a user eventually reaching your site, no matter where they first encounter your brand.

4. Improved Digital Marketing Strategy Efficiency

SEO is an essential building block for every serious marketing strategy. For instance, it complements PPC marketing, allowing you to get the most traffic and leads out of search engines.

As Jacob Arsh at Onyx8 Digital Agency points out, businesses can’t implement successful PPC campaigns without great content marketing. And for your content to be relevant, you need SEO. As he explains, without SEO, digital marketing campaigns can end up wasting your budget.

In content marketing, long-form content, guides, how-to articles, and videos, and “alternative to” pages, enriched with product-focused keywords, can further increase the chances of making a sale, especially when they align with buyer search intent. Additionally, you can reshare high-quality, optimized content on your social channels or link them to older but still relevant posts to maintain an active social presence.

In affiliate marketing, SEO also plays a crucial role in running effective campaigns. As a brand or merchant, partnering with an affiliate who has an optimized site ensures you attract the right audience to drive relevant traffic toward your promoted products.

5. Better Site Performance

SEO has come a long way from its early days of keyword stuffing to a more user-centric approach. Modern SEO now combines technical optimization and user experience (UX) to improve your site’s performance and rankings.

Today, SEO is often integrated from the start of web design and development, especially as UX and UI have become a focal point in how search engines evaluate websites. During the design process, SEO experts collaborate with designers to make sure both user and search engine requirements are met.

For instance, technical SEO addresses different areas of your website’s performance, such as page loading speed, site structure, and navigation. Here’s how:

• Page loading speed: Pages need to load quickly to keep users engaged and reduce bounce rates
• Site structure and navigation: A logical site structure can help users find what they’re looking for. It also assists search engines like Google to better understand what your site is about. Having an easily navigable and easy-to-understand website can undoubtedly boost your rankings.

When Is the Right Time To Start With SEO?

As mentioned, SEO should already be a key consideration as early as your site’s design and development process. This enables you to address crucial technical aspects and design standards early on, allowing you to start on-page optimization as soon as you start populating your pages with content. This includes integrating keywords into various elements such as site content, metadata, alt text, and more.

Starting SEO early also allows you to bring in traffic to your site from the get-go. Since considerable ranking and traffic improvements take a while — typically around three to six months — this process can be easier to bear when your website goes live alongside your SEO efforts.

Businesses that delay their SEO efforts often face difficulties in making radical changes to optimize their website according to new strategies. However, partnering with an SEO consultant can help you identify troublesome areas and create an action plan to boost your online visibility.

Compelling Cases: Is Working With an SEO Company Worth It?

What long-term benefits can teaming up with an SEO company offer? Below, we’ve gathered case studies from our partner agencies that demonstrate how powerful SEO can be in the right hands.

1. WebFX

Kampground of America partnered with WebFX to enhance their SEO efforts, resulting in both real-world and digital revenue. The client experienced:

• 150% increase in organic traffic
• 160% surge in new-user traffic
• 15% rise in organic conversion rates
• 198% growth in organic transactions
• 260% increase in organic revenue

These results showcase the substantial impact that a well-executed SEO strategy can have.

2. Searchbloom

Searchbloom helped a Chicago-based plastic surgery practice get back on the digital map after years of declining website relevancy and authority. By implementing a strategic three-tiered approach and revamping the website, the agency achieved a staggering 3,200% increase in keyword rankings within the top three positions over a year-long period

3. Digital Silk

Digital Silk helped Kenoa Health generate more B2B leads. Thanks to the agency’s comprehensive approach, which goes beyond SEO, the company enjoyed a 42% improvement in organic search, coupled with a dramatic improvement in discoverability and user engagement.

Common Misconceptions: Is SEO Worth the Money?

What are the main concerns business owners have with SEO? There are several factors that often prevent them from seeing the true value and potential of search engine optimization. Here are some of them:

• SEO is expensive
• No immediate results
• SEO is cheating
• SEO is constant work

1. SEO Is Expensive

Many business owners worry about the cost of SEO can be costly, especially since results aren’t immediate or guaranteed. On average, SEO services range from $1,000 to $5,000 per month, depending on a range of factors like the scope of work and the agency you outsource to. If you opt to handle SEO in-house, you'll need to hire the right talent and provide them with the necessary infrastructure to work, not to mention the paperwork required to meet workforce regulations.

While SEO services may cost you, the potential for a substantial ROI means you can earn more than what you invest. In fact, SEO is considered by many expert marketers as one of the top digital marketing channels in terms of ROI. Data shows that a well-rounded SEO campaign can drive an average ROI of 748%, meaning you earn $7.48 for every dollar spent.

2. No Immediate Results

SEO takes time. Unlike PPC, where results often come instantly, improving visibility is a longer process. Performing keyword research, updating content on all your pages, optimizing metadata, addressing technical aspects, and waiting for Google to find, crawl, and index your site is time-consuming and some people just see no sense in waiting that long for results.

However, once your rankings improve, maintaining your position becomes less demanding. While you still need to constantly improve and work on your SEO, you'll likely need to spend less to sustain or improve your results over time. Think of it like a smart HVAC system: installation and maintenance costs may be high initially, but once it’s set up, you’ll spend less to generate the same level of performance.

3. SEO Is Cheating

You are only cheating if you attempt to trick search engines and get to the top of the rankings using black-hat SEO tactics like doorway pages, hidden text or links, fake redirects, or cloaking. Fortunately, these outdated methods no longer work, and most reputable agencies and experts don’t rely on them anymore.

Moreover, getting caught simply isn’t worth the risk for most business owners who are in digital marketing for the long haul. Google penalizes sites that engage in such practices by temporarily or permanently de-indexing them from the search engine. This impacts the brand’s rankings and damages its online reputation.

4. SEO Is Constant Work

Yes, SEO does require ongoing attention. Content can become outdated, user queries change, Google rolls out algorithm updates, and design trends change outdated — each of these factors can hurt your rankings. However, SEO is most demanding during the initial phases, and it’s far easier to update existing content and post new content than repopulate your site from the ground up.

Additionally, website redesigns are usually due every two to three years, but if your structure and navigation are SEO-friendly, the work will be minimal. You can also regularly check your links to ensure none are broken.

So, while SEO does require constant work, it gets easier over time. In contrast, PPC may need less ongoing effort, but when your budget runs out, your ranking can plummet instantly. With SEO, even if you pause campaigns, it will take some time to see a decline in your traffic.

Who Is SEO Not Worth It For?

SEO is the cornerstone of every good digital marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right strategy for everyone. In the following cases, your digital presence might not require a full-scale SEO commitment:

• Your website plays a superficial role: Some businesses may only have a website for the sake of having one and generate enough sales through traditional, offline tactics or have already built a network of loyal clients, making SEO almost unnecessary.
• Businesses with small budgets: SEO requires sufficient funds. If you have limited resources, you can try to grow your audience on social media organically or launch paid campaigns to reach even more people.
• Businesses that don’t have (or need) a website: If your business operates exclusively through social media platforms and doesn’t plan on building a website, SEO may not be necessary for you.
• Businesses with an offline target market: Who do you want to reach if your target audiences aren’t using the internet? Some local businesses can generate enough sales from word-of-mouth marketing that they don’t need to optimize anything for Google.

SEO vs PPC vs Traditional Marketing: What You Need To Know

SEO, PPC, and traditional marketing all have the same goal — improve your brand recognition, bring in more customers, and boost profits. However, they are not the same thing. Here’s a table that outlines their key differences to help you determine which strategy suits your business best:

Value of SEO: Takeaways

You can offer the best products, stellar services, and outstanding content, but if your target audience can’t find them, they’ll likely turn to your competitors. Effective digital marketing relies heavily on SEO to improve your brand’s discoverability online, acting as traffic signals that guide both potential prospects and Google to your site. By prioritizing SEO, you position your business to be discovered, recognized, and chosen in a competitive market.

Is SEO Worth It? FAQs

1. Should every business do SEO?

SEO is crucial for every business that wants to be visible to their target audiences on major search engines. It can boost brand and product awareness, build trust, and authority, and generate qualified lead traffic to your site, potentially converting visitors into customers. However, not every business needs SEO services, especially those who aren't interested in expanding their online reach and rankings.

2. Is SEO superior to PPC?

It depends on how you look at it. In terms of yielding results quickly, PPC is superior to SEO. If your goal is to invest in a strategy that drives sustainable organic traffic and supports your entire digital marketing ecosystem, then SEO is the better approach.

Both of these strategies have their place in a well-rounded digital strategy, and they can complement each other when used cleverly.

3. Will SEO remain relevant?

SEO will most likely remain relevant. So far, SEO has managed to adapt to the challenges Google and emerging technologies have thrown at it. From frequent algorithm changes to the rise of voice search, artificial intelligence, and interactive web technologies, SEO has found a way to, well, optimize things for the better.