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

In this episode, Jules White asks the more honest question about SEO: not whether it works, but whether your business actually needs it, and whether now is the right time. It's a conversation she's had more and more as her own business has evolved, and she argues both sides before landing on where she stands.

Jules explains what SEO really is, why it keeps bringing people in long after the work is done, and how that differs from social media and ads, where the traffic stops the moment you do. Drawing on her own time as commercial manager at a busy hair & beauty salon, she shows how the same business can sit on either side of the answer: needing SEO to fill the diary and sell more products, or being comfortable enough on word of mouth that it can wait. She's honest about who can deprioritise it, referrals-only businesses, people who only ever need a few extra clients, anyone who needs clients this week, and those with no time or budget, while making the case that even people who don't strictly need more leads often still want the one form of marketing that keeps working while they're not marketing.

Key Takeaways:

The Honest Question: Learn why "does my business need SEO?" is a better starting point than "is SEO worth it?", and how your situation, not your industry, decides the answer.

What SEO Actually Does: Understand why SEO is front-loaded work that keeps bringing the right people in steadily, helping you avoid the feast-or-famine cycle.

When You Can Ease Off: Hear the honest case for referrals-only businesses, why full books with no waiting list can still leave you vulnerable, and why social media is optional.

Why Relationships Come First: If you need clients right now, Jules explains why your existing network, not SEO and not social media, is the fastest route.

The Long-Term Asset: Discover why your website is something you own and build, how AI search can now show results faster than the old wait for Google, and why understanding the basics matters before you outsource anything.

If you're on the fence about SEO, this episode will help you decide whether it's the right move for your business right now.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Join the free Success Without Socials community
• Join The Website Growth Club, for business owners who want to get more traffic & sales from search
• Episode 139: How to use content you own to grow without social media
• Episode 009: Why a content strategy is your first step to website success
• Episode 002: Why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm
• Episode 104: You've been sold a lie, smarter ways to be visible without social media
• Episode 105: Why your brain and business deserves a break from harmful social media
• Episode 142: Before you pay someone to do SEO

Transcript

Introduction 

Jules White: 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.

Um, but now I've got the Success Without Socials community, which is off of social media.

Then I thought I'd come and record live in here.

So annoyingly, I'm just popping in 'cause 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.

Um, 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 gonna 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 gonna talk about whether your business needs SEO and the honest question really on whether SEO is worth it and whether it's something that you should invest in in your business. And this is a conversation I've had more and more as my business has evolved.

I'm very much more aware of this now, when clients are coming in and when people are booking discovery calls and things like that, 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 in general 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. I think that's definitely 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 gonna dive into that a little bit today and give you my thoughts on this, and you can then make your own decision 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 that a little bit easier.

That process of actually getting your SEO working for you, getting your website bringing you a steady stream of clients into your business and, yeah, we can go from there.

So

Does Your Business Need a Steady Stream of Clients?

Jules White: One of the first things to consider when you're thinking about whether SEO is right for your business and whether you need it in your business, I would always ask the question of whether you need a steady stream of clients coming into your business.

Do you always need new clients and customers coming into your business? Will you always need that?

Will you always need new people? And for most businesses, that is true.

For some businesses it's true to a much greater extent than others.

And I think we've all got to keep marketing our business. It is 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 is through relationship building or through active marketing, like posting on socials.

Email marketing, I mean, there are hundreds of ways that we can market our business, but we still have to market our business realistically. We've still got to continue to spread the word about what we do and how we help people and what the benefit is to them from actually working with us.

So

in case this is your first episode of the podcast, the first time you've stumbled upon this concept of SEO,

let's start off with a little bit about what SEO actually is, what it stands for, and what the big benefit of it is really.

So,

What is SEO?

Jules White: SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which fundamentally just means setting up your website so that it shows up in searches on Google.

Now, in AI search as well. So you get recommended by AI searches or in AI searches, and essentially making sure that when people are out there searching for a business like yours or a solution to their problem, then your business is the one that gets shown up in the search results.

Now, one of the big benefits of it is that it can keep bringing people into your business, even long after you've done the work.

So SEO's quite front-loaded. So we do lots of work at the beginning and really get everything set up.

We start with your core pages, get those set up ready so that the things that you sell are the first things that you are actually showing up for in your business. And we then would think about expanding that 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 & Ads

Jules White: Whereas when you're posting, when you're doing things on social media, once you've posted and that post has had its run through the algorithm, whatever that is, whatever today's stats are on that, whether it's hours, minutes, or if you're TikTok days, once you stop posting, then the traffic stops as well.

And it's the same with ads as well. So if you are paying for ads to bring people into your business, as soon as you stop paying for those ads, then the traffic stops as well.

So I think back to my days in the salon, and I was in charge of the website when I was back in this salon.

Had I known about SEO, it could definitely have helped with the times where we needed more clients.

Not as a last-minute thing, not as a, okay, we need a client this week. I mean, it could have helped that, but not in terms of if we were just starting to think about SEO, but it helps to prevent those big peaks and troughs.

Because you've always got new people finding your business or existing clients, if they're looking for additional services, if they're looking to solve a problem and your business is the one that shows up, especially if they're already existing clients and then they suddenly realise that you can help them with this as well as the other thing that you already helped them with, then that's what helps.

Keeping that steady stream of people finding you.

But I think about things like the products in the salon. So 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 if you are a solopreneur and it's just you and it's just your diary that you need to fill, then potentially you don't need SEO quite as much, especially if you're already pretty much fully booked.

If you get a couple of spaces to take on new clients, probably the fastest way to do that is to tell your existing clients, I've got space to take on one more client.

You know, do you know anybody who's looking for a new stylist or a new therapist?

And then that way you are not getting a massive influx of people coming in. You're not relying on social media as well.

I think probably right now the biggest immediate pull is, okay, 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 social media strategy. If you're not using it well already, we have that feeling of, oh, if I just post, maybe I'll get some new clients.

And maybe you would.

But realistically, we are dependent on the algorithm even showing our content up.

And then if it does show it up, only a small percentage of our audience actually even see it. And you are interrupting people's scroll.

So people aren't out there actually searching for what you do and then you show up as a solution. You're trying to interrupt the scroll and it's just exhausting really.

And that's not the best way to immediately bring new clients in.

If you just need to fill a few spots in a diary, then definitely word of mouth is the fastest way to do that. But if you always need new people coming in, so if you've got a bigger team where there's gonna be a little bit more churn just purely by the nature of, you know, 10 people in the salon need to keep their books full.

There's always gonna be more demand to fill those appointments really.

But with the salon, we could have always been selling more products. And that was the thing that was really scalable in the salon, is if we could have sold more Clarins products, then we could have made more money, we would've made more profit, had more money to reinvest into the business.

So if we could have made sure that we were actually showing up when people were searching for, not just Clarins, the hair products, the specific brands that we did, the nail brands that we did, all of those kind of things, if we had much more SEO in place for that, that would've massively helped in terms of actually an uptick of new people coming into the business.

And then who knows, that would also then feed into the appointment books as well, into the one-to-one slots of people finding out about us because they discover that we sell Clarins, and then they come in for a facial and then they decide to get their hair cut there or get a blow dry after their facial.

And it all feeds into itself really.

So that is definitely something where if you need people steadily coming into your business, and you always need that steady stream of the right people coming in, then it massively helps. It helps you to predict how busy you're gonna be.

It helps you to not then have the feast or famine feeling all the time.

It helps you to plan, it helps you to grow. It helps you to have more money coming into your business because you're not having these dead slots in your diary or the stock sitting on the shelves for months and you haven't been able to sell it.

So it all helps to bring people into your business really.

And also if you have a business where you always need new clients, so you help people, they get better or they use your service once or twice and that's a natural end to it. They don't need to keep coming back every six weeks for a haircut or whatever.

Now. If you make that decision of, yes, SEO sounds like a good thing for my business.

The other thing it can help you with as you're doing the work on your SEO, it can make your business in general stronger and better. Regardless of whether you are doing SEO as well, you still need to be marketing your business in other places.

I always say try and have one active form of marketing and one more passive form of marketing.

The SEO, once you've done that initial work, becomes a much more passive way of marketing your business because those leads are still coming in. That steady stream of clients is still coming into your business long after you've done the work.

And maybe you would just be once a month looking at your stats, looking at any opportunities to really optimise further and to make the most of, like if you're getting lots of visitors to your website, how can you make sure more people convert?

Making sure that you're getting return customers and actually all of that kind of stuff, which you would just do over time once you've got your initial setup done on your SEO. You're moving into that maintenance phase of actually, okay, now I just need to keep things ticking along.

Keep an eye on what Google's doing. Keep an eye on what's happening with AI search and just look for more opportunities to grow further.

But your clients coming, new clients coming into your business doesn't depend on you doing that because you've already set up that passive marketing channel of the SEO doing the work for you regardless of whether you are out walking the dog, falling asleep or on the beach.

But

How SEO Strengthens Your Business & Messaging

Jules White: As you're doing this work on the SEO and getting your website working for your business, it helps you to become clearer on your message, clearer on who your ideal clients are and the problems that you solve for them.

One thing I've seen with clients as well is it helps them to become more confident as they're doing this work and actually having to think about what are those real problems that I help people with? What are the ways that I'm actually making people's lives better?

And the majority of the clients that I work with are businesses that do help to make people's lives better.

So I love that. That's part of the reason that I really, really love my business and the types of clients that I do attract.

And I think if you feel like you're really making a change in the world, then it's so powerful to keep you going on the days where it does get hard, because business is hard and working for yourself is hard.

It can definitely be hard. So knowing that you're making a difference makes a difference to you as a business owner, but it also helps with all of the other marketing as well.

Most businesses still need some kind of active way of marketing, so that might be word of mouth, it might be doing some networking, it might be doing some email marketing.

So once you are clearer on your messaging, once you're clearer on the problems that you solve for people who you're specifically trying to attract, what kind of words those people use as well.

And this is one of the big things I see when I work with clients, either one-to-one or in the Website Growth Club. Really seeing those light bulb moments where we do some work, we look at some of the things that they should be showing up for, and maybe they're not.

We look at some keywords, look at what's actually already happening within their online presence, what things they really should be associated with.

And they're not.

And this is more important than ever with AI search because of the nature of it. And because of the fact that AI is looking to recommend experts and to have those real strong trust signals come across.

That it helps you to understand why you are an expert. And it helps you to understand how you can use those words across all different types of channels in your marketing, even if that is coming down to your one-minute pitch

or when you are out networking, how you're introducing yourself.

This is something that really helps to strengthen your business. There is work to do with this, and this is part of the reason why SEO feels quite front-heavy because you do have to get clear on this and sometimes this work can be quite hard to do and it can be a bit triggering really.

And we have to start gathering our thoughts, getting it somewhere outside of our brain, outside of AI as well. 'Cause I think we are now at a point where a lot of business owners are having these regular conversations with AI about their business and about their marketing.

And it can often just end up leading to all of these long chats where, you know, okay, yeah, there's loads of gold in there, there's loads of stuff in there that's really helpful, but then it's just more noise.

Whereas one of the things that Website Growth Club members will do is they will set up an info base.

So that is the place where you gather all of that information outside of your brain and outside of your chats with ChatGPT or Claude or whichever AI platform you're using so that you have it there as a bank of content and a bank of ideas and a bank of words that you can use, whatever kind of marketing you are doing in your business.

So it helps you to be more organised with all of that, have more confidence in what you are selling and in your business and to actually make it work for you as well.

Now

Creating Content You Own

Jules White: One of the fundamental things that I believe is that we should create content that we own first.

Back in episode 139, I talked about how to use your own content to grow without social media. I also talked about this in some of the early episodes of the podcast as well.

So episode nine, why a content strategy is your first step to website success. And there was another one that I'm thinking of.

It was back in episode two, why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm, use your existing content potential to show up in search.

So creating something that you own, which you own your website, you don't own your social media accounts, you don't own YouTube.

You don't own like your Substack.

You don't own that, but you do own your website. So it means that you are in full control of your messaging there.

That should be the hub of your online content. So everything else always points back to your own domain and your own website.

And as you are working on your SEO, your website is becoming clearer.

You're building trust for people when they come through to your website before they've ever even had contact with you. Your website can either build trust or destroy it.

You are building a strong presence online and the place where everything, all of the other messages that are out there about your business, the place that they will come back to, which you then own, you have full control of, and you are building it in a way that then makes it easier for the bots to actually surface your content.

So as you work on your SEO, you'll be working on things like your message clarity, as I've said, you'll be then applying that to your website strategically.

So you'll be working on the structure of your website pages, your page titles, page descriptions, the headings on your pages,

frequently asked questions that you use on your page, whether you've got broken links and things on your website pages as well.

And these aren't necessarily the things that you would do first, but over time, as you work on your SEO, you would be thinking about that. You'd be thinking about how you can make the most of the images on your website, which can be really strong, particularly for local businesses as well.

That can be something that can really help in terms of actually showing up and getting your SEO working for your business.

You'll also be thinking about how you can link your content together, how you can look for other links to bring into your content as well.

You'll be thinking about things like page speed and whether your website is actually set up in a way that will help you moving forward, not just now as well.

So whether as things change with the algorithm and as things change with AI search, then your website is already set up with the fundamentals in place, which makes it a lot easier then to keep up with things as things do update and as things do change and things always change really, but it means that you've got the foundations there in place and your website is fundamentally set up in a way that works.

So that then becomes an asset for your business. If you've got a website that's got plenty of traffic coming in, if you then link that to your email list and you grow an email list for your business as well, keep in touch with them, then that becomes a valuable asset to your business.

A business that has a way to keep in touch with its clients and regular traffic coming into the business and regular leads coming into the business is a lot more valuable than a business who's always constantly having to market actively and having to drag people kicking and screaming into them really.

So, yeah, that's definitely a way that you're building an additional asset for your business that not only works for you right now, but also helps to really show that your business is strong and that it's valuable really.

So we've talked about why it is a good idea and why you might need SEO.

When You Might NOT Need SEO

Jules White: Let's talk about those people who may not need SEO or it might not be the right time for it right now.

So I've mentioned if you only need a few extra clients and you only ever will need a few extra clients, if you get a few gaps in your books, then you are able to fill that by word of mouth.

And one thing I would say with that is if you are full with clients and you don't have a waiting list, then that's where potentially you could get some problems.

If you lose a few clients at once, if you've got any gaps realistically that you can't then fill last minute, you haven't got that waitlist ready, then you are a little bit vulnerable.

And so that's where potentially having new inquiries come in all the time can be helpful. But realistically, if that's all you need, you just need a few clients, then SEO might not necessarily be the strongest marketing route for you.

Now, I definitely work with people who are aware of that.

They're aware that actually they do get fully booked and they don't necessarily always need new clients coming in, but they still want to work on their SEO because they still want to show up in the area for what they do. They don't want to be using social media.

And they're also thinking about the future.

So I think we definitely can worry with word of mouth and with referrals that if that dries up, then what if my business dries up?

But I think we have to be a little bit optimistic about that. I think really that if your business relies 100% on referrals, that's okay.

And as long as you are still doing the things that get the referrals coming in, so still giving good service, still asking people to refer you, still being conscious of what the pipeline is looking like and what your appointment books are looking like over the next few months, not just next week, then that's okay.

It is okay to not have to constantly market your business.

But what I would say is if you are in that position and you are still marketing on social media, then what is that actually doing for you?

Because I think that's something as well where we have this thing where we all feel like we've 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.

So I think there's definitely this feeling for all businesses, I think really, where we are just told that you have to be on social media. And if you're not on social media, then you're failing.

But actually, if you are fully booked and you're pretty much okay with referrals and with keeping your pipeline full in the future,

then it's okay, you don't have to use social media. And that's my big message, is that you don't have to use social media.

Social media is optional, and don't believe the lie that you have to use it all the time really.

So that's okay if you don't need clients, if you don't need constant new clients, if you are 100% dependent on referrals and you are okay with that, you feel comfortable with that, you feel comfortable with not getting new inquiries all the time to back it up, then that's fine, that's fine.

You might not need SEO.

But if you're in that situation and your business is 100% client-based and you are fully booked and pretty much always are, but you are thinking, okay, I know somewhere down the line I want to be moving to more of a scalable business.

I wanna be moving to selling more products, or a one-to-many type offer, or I wanna be doing group programmes or offering anything where you need more people coming in.

Then I would challenge you. Even if you don't need that right now, if you are thinking of that for anything within the near or distant future really, then working on your authority, which your SEO helps to build your authority, is something you should be considering in the background as well.

And I work with a lot of people who are in this situation. So they've been a one-to-one service provider.

They're now moving to the point where they want to scale things and they want to have more online offers.

And then it's like, okay, well where do all these people come from?

And actually, if you've built up your SEO around the one-to-one services that you offer and what you then move on to do with the one-to-many or selling more products is related to that, then actually building up your authority as that service provider is gonna be really, really valuable.

And the sooner you start doing that, the easier it is then to sell when you get to the point where you've got something scalable to sell, I think really.

I think the other reason I would say that you maybe don't need SEO, another one where a lot of people come to me thinking they need SEO, but they need more clients right now.

So they're either in early stages of their business or something has changed, or maybe they've lost some regular clients and they're now in a panic about marketing and they're thinking, I don't wanna be on social media.

Or they've started trying using social media and it's not really worked and they hate it.

And so they hear about SEO and they hear how it can bring you a steady stream of clients into your business, which it absolutely can, but it's not necessarily the fastest way to do that.

In fact, it's not. I'm gonna take the necessarily out of that.

It's not the fastest way to do that.

For me, I would always say 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

Jules White: If you need clients next week, you need to be talking to the people you know about what you do. And ideally, you would've already built some relationships there.

So you're not just then trying to sell to people without actually having any pennies in the jar to then take out, you know, you've not built and maintained those relationships with them.

But even without that, even if you haven't built those relationships, even just your existing network, so the people who are friends, business acquaintances, people that you see regularly, because with them, you will have built up a little bit of trust.

They wanna help you. They understand you. They know that you're gonna be reliable if they then tell people about what you do.

That is probably the fastest way to get new clients right away. But this is often the point, I think, where people do tip into thinking about long term.

So if you've suddenly had this panic that you haven't got clients, maybe you then solve it by getting the word out about what you do.

But I think it always leaves that nagging doubt in your mind of, well, actually, I don't wanna be in this situation a year from now if this happens again, or three months from now if this happens again, I don't wanna be in this situation repeatedly.

And that's where actually starting to think about SEO and getting something working for you in the background so you don't have such a panic.

If you get a couple of clients who leave or a couple of clients move away or whatever, a couple of contracts come to an end, then you don't have to worry so much about that feast and famine type situation again, really.

But if you are looking for clients this week, then SEO's not gonna bring you that.

It can work quite quickly though, that being said.

And I would say it can definitely work faster than social media, especially if you're a location-based business and you've got a Google Business Profile and you're not making the most of that, then that's one way you can get very quick wins.

The other thing that we are actually now finding as well is that with AI search, it can happen a lot faster.

So whereas before we used to have to wait for Google to crawl through our website, re-index it, and we still have this about three-month lag on this.

I had this recently with a client who had unfortunately had a bit of a botched website migration, where she suddenly realised three months after she'd had a migration, her traffic had literally gone like flatlined.

She'd lost every bit of organic traffic that she had.

We did some work, we fixed some of the problems on the new website, we fixed some of the fundamental things.

We did a power hour together and I just advised her and she went off and did some of these fixes.

And then a couple of months after that, we then saw the traffic come back up to where it was, which was great.

I was really pleased to see that because she had still moved to another platform, so there were no guarantees that it was gonna recover that quickly.

But actually just focusing on those most important things first helped her to recover.

So that's where there's a lag on Google and organic search. There is a lag basically where we wait for Google to crawl to our sites.

Whereas with AI search, it can literally be straight away because it goes out and it crawls through what's happening on the internet right now.

And I had this on my own business where it was a while back where I did a flash sale on my SEO for podcast course.

So the sale finished on the Friday and I was doing a debrief on the Monday with myself.

And I was running the sales page through ChatGPT and asking it to look at the offer and looking at anything I can improve for the next time I run an offer on this.

And as far as I knew, I'd been through and changed everything on the page where it mentioned that it was, I think I did a 50% offer flash sale.

And I'd changed everything on the page, and then ChatGPT came back and said, oh, well I can see you've got 50% off.

And I was like, well, where, why, where are you seeing that on this page?

And it had gone out and crawled through and seen it on my Instagram and it had seen a post I'd done on the Friday on my Instagram that had then showed up related to that offer.

So it's that fast that actually if you make changes and the AI bots crawl through your website in live real time, it can be faster.

So I think this is a great thing because it means that the work that we do, we can see results straight away with it.

And that's not, when we are thinking about SEO, we are thinking about the work that you do right now pays dividends in 3, 6, 9, 12 months time and beyond.

So if you are thinking that you still wanna be in business in 12 months and onwards, then thinking about your SEO right now and starting to get some of those changes in place that not only help with search, but also help with conversions,

helps with the clarity, it helps if you do depend on just referrals and people get referred to you.

And they go through to your website.

Then actually making sure that you've worked on your SEO and your messaging and the clarity of your website can then help to make those people more likely to actually convert and become clients.

So all of that to say by doing this work, it's not a quick fix.

And I definitely don't class SEO as a quick fix, but it can have faster results than certainly social media.

It can have faster results than other forms of marketing.

And it's continual results that keep on happening.

And that's the goal, is that you then get to a point where you're not having to market your business all the time so you can then free up time to think about things like how you can grow your business, how you can scale it, how you can maybe take some more time for what you want to do outside of your business.

Imagine if you could take social media off of the table so you don't have to do that.

Or if you could take that big chunk of marketing that you always have to do, if you could take that away, what would that free up for you in your business or in your life in general?

What would that give you back in terms of mental clarity, in terms of peace of mind, in terms of business growth?

Then that's the reason why SEO is so important for your business really.

So there's probably one other reason why SEO might not be right for your business right now.

And

No Time or Budget for SEO?

Jules White: That is if you don't have any time or budget to do anything to do with your SEO.

So if you've literally got no time and you don't have any time that you could take from somewhere else, like if you are marketing through social media and it's not working for your business or you're marketing through social media, but then that also means that you spend quite a lot of time just scrolling 'cause you are on the platform.

You are caught in the algorithm, which these algorithms are actually set up to keep us there.

And 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.

So they are designed to keep you there and they make you feel like crap.

They make you feel like crap so you wanna go back on it.

And they also are addictive. They're addictive, so they absolutely keep you there.

They're rewiring your brain to keep you on the platform.

So if you don't have any time for SEO and you don't have any time for your website, thinking a little bit about, okay, how much time am I actually spending on my phone or on my desktop, either on social media or just in general, like where are those little snippets of time that are stealing your attention as a business owner potentially.

If you can claw some time back from that and spend that on the asset that you own and on your website and SEO and actually growing a longer term marketing strategy for your business, then great.

If you literally have none of that, so there's no way that you can actually find any time and you don't have any budget.

And by budget I would mean a decent budget.

If you're gonna pay somebody else to do your SEO for you, then you need a really good budget.

And I would still challenge you that if you don't have any time, then you're very vulnerable outsourcing when you don't have the time as the business owner, either you or somebody within your business, to be involved in the strategy on this.

And I talked about this, I feel like I've talked about all sorts of episodes here with links to different episodes.

I talked about this a couple of episodes ago, episode 142, before you pay someone to do SEO, what to think about before then, really.

I think I personally, and this is why I work this way with clients, I think that you need to understand what you're outsourcing, whether you're outsourcing it to an agency or outsourcing it to AI, I think is even the biggest danger at the moment where we are moving into.

There's a real strong argument for understanding the basics before you start outsourcing.

So that's another thing where I would sort of challenge around if you don't have any time and you don't have any budget, and if you have budget but you don't have any time, be really cautious about outsourcing.

Because yeah, SEO does need some time. You need to put the work in,

whether you do the implementation yourself or not. If you've got somebody to handle the getting it onto your website part, the actual strategy about what you want your business to be showing up for, what you want to be known for as a business, as a person, what you should be seen as the expert in, you need to do that part as a business owner.

So that's definitely where you might think, actually can I do SEO?

But then also think about what's the cost of not doing that?

So what's the long-term cost of not finding some time and budget to do this really.

So all that to say,

Key Takeaways & Wrap Up

Jules White: I hope this has been helpful. I hope it has given you some ideas of why SEO might be right for your business or maybe might not.

One of the key takeaways I would say is the fact that SEO is building an asset for your own business.

And once you get it set up, it keeps working for your business even while you're not actually out there marketing your business.

And that's the big thing. And also that it connects with people when they're searching.

So we are not just trying to interrupt people's scroll. We are not just trying to interrupt people's day in their inbox, in their email inbox.

People are out there searching for what you do and searching for businesses like yours, searching for a solution to their problem.

And if we can position you as that solution, then they're already so much further along that buyer's journey.

So I would definitely say if you are on the fence about this, then SEO is a really strong way to market your business and to help to make your life easier.

I think as a business owner, marketing can be really hard and I think it's something, as I said at the start, that we all need to be doing.

So what can we do to make it easier for ourselves really?

So I hope that this has given you some food for thought on whether SEO is right for your business.

If you're thinking you would like to grow your business without social media, please come and join my community Success Without Socials.

I'll leave the link to that in the show notes as well. Or you can find details on my website, thewebsitesuccesshub.com.

Come and join us. It is full of like-minded business owners who are growing their business without social media because social media is optional.

So I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I'll see you soon. Bye.