Why SEO is not as free as they say!

I thought that statement was appropriate for this topic. Yes, it may seem at first that your SEO is completely free. But when you really get into it, you know that's not true at all.

In this article, I explain why SEO is therefore not free.

What is SEO?

You may not think it's necessary to start with the question, "what is SEO?" first. But the answer to that question is crucial to explaining to you why SEO is actually not free at all. So I'll do it anyway.

SEO consists of three parts:

• The technology (of your website)
• The content (which is on your website)
• The authority (of your website).

So when we talk about technology, we are talking about technical aspects such as load time, indexability, how your website is built, etc.

When we talk about content, we are talking about the texts, images and videos used on your website.

And when we talk about authority, it's mainly about the number of links leading to your website.

Now that we all know what we're talking about, I'm going to tell you why SEO is not at all as free as you might think.

Why do people say SEO is free anyway?

Like any other part of online marketing, blogs like this one, YouTube videos and e-books will get you a long way.

But this doesn't just apply to SEO, by the way. This also applies, for example, to e-mail marketing or, for example, a channel such as Facebook.

So learning SEO is absolutely free to do. And then it is also free to be findable become the search engines. In fact, you don't have to pay anything directly to Google to be findable.

And if you make the choice to spend twice as much time on SEO, it costs you basically nothing extra. That's exactly what people mean when they say SEO is free.

Why SEO is not free at all

Saying that SEO is free is the same as saying that becoming a top athlete is free.

The time you put in "costs" you nothing, but the nutrition, shoes, advice, sports watch and all those other necessary things certainly cost money.

And it works the same way within SEO. You need the right tools, sometimes paid training, a website including hosting, a good domain name and, of course, a lot of time.

What they actually mean when they say SEO is free

I understand very well what people mean when they say it's free. What they actually mean to say is that starting with SEO is free.

In fact, after reading a few blogs, you can very easily figure out keywords, write your first optimized content and become findable within Google.

But at some point you hit a wall. Your competitors have a faster website, have better content and buy relevant backlinks on a monthly basis.

And so they do pay for their SEO. So I actually see it very black and white. Beginner SEO is virtually free, but expert level SEO is not.

Especially not if you need help from an outside SEO specialist or online marketing agency. And we haven't talked about the latter two at all.

Because they also cost money (which, of course, is supposed to make money, but even that is by no means the case everywhere).

Why does SEO seem more free than other online marketing disciplines?

To 9 out of 10 startups, my advice is often the same: for the next 2 years, put all your remaining time into creating valuable content.

If you do that well for 2 years, I'm sure you can build a business on that.
Start with 1 blog a month and scale that up as fast as you can. Scale that up to a number that suits you well. For me, that was 2 blogs a week, but with the advent of the podcast, it's more like 2 blogs a month now.

Whether you blog once a month or once a part of the day, it's not going to cost you more (money). For example, do you want to bring in the same number of visitors with Google Ads? Then of course it will cost you money.

Want to bring in the same number of visitors with your Facebook page? Then Facebook is going to limit your reach because you post too much.

What people mean when they say SEO is free is that content creation doesn't cost money. That writing, say, an e-book or social media doesn't cost money.

But do you really want to be at the top of Google and beat your competitors on competitive keywords? Then SEO does cost you money.

So saying that SEO is free is not entirely fair.

This article was written March 29, 2021 and updated September 12, 2023.