Is SEO worth it?

It pays when people are already searching for what you sell, when a search brings you a customer worth more than a few pounds, and when you can keep spending for a year.

Take any one of those away and the case gets weak fast. That is a narrower answer than the industry usually gives, and it is the honest one.

There is existing demand. People type what you sell into a search box. If nobody is searching, SEO cannot find them and you need a channel that creates demand rather than catching it.

The customer is worth enough. A £40 order can work at volume. A £4,000 contract works almost immediately. The arithmetic below is unforgiving in between.

You can wait. Organic search compounds and it is slow. A business that needs revenue this quarter should be buying ads instead.

Your site is not fighting you. If pages take four weeks to publish, the best SEO plan in the country will not survive contact with your release process.

A brand-new category nobody searches for yet. A business that needs to double revenue in six months. A product with a lifetime value of a few pounds and no repeat purchase. A site nobody is allowed to change.

Also, honestly: a market where three national brands own every term and you have a tenth of their budget. You can win a niche inside that market, but not the head term, and an agency that tells you otherwise is selling you a year.

Month three. You should see technical fixes landing and the first content ranking for terms nobody was fighting over. Not revenue yet.

Month six. The trend should be readable. If non-brand organic traffic is flat at six months, ask hard questions.

Month twelve. You should be able to answer the only question that matters: did this bring in more of the right business than it cost? If you cannot answer it at twelve months, the measurement was never set up, and that is worth more attention than the rankings.

Work it backwards rather than forwards. Take what a customer is worth to you, and what share of enquiries you convert.

At £2,000 a month, over a year, you are spending £24,000. If a customer is worth £500 and you convert one enquiry in five, you need about 240 extra enquiries to break even. If a customer is worth £5,000, you need 24, which is a different conversation entirely.

Do that sum before the first agency call. It will tell you whether you are buying SEO or buying hope, and it takes five minutes.