Is SEO Worth It? An Honest Answer for Small Businesses

Is SEO worth it?

The easy answer, for most businesses, is yes. But it’s a little more nuanced than that.

Like everything in business, SEO comes down to return on investment.

The return depends on whether people search for what you sell. If they do, showing up when they search can bring in a lot of customers. If they don’t, the return will be small, however good your SEO is.

The investment is your time and money, and it isn’t a one-off. SEO is something you keep working on, and it can take as much as six months (or more) to start paying off.

So the real question isn’t whether SEO works. It’s whether the return is worth the investment for your business right now. The quick test below will help you work that out.

The quick test: is SEO worth it for your small business?

Answer three questions:

1. Do people search for what you sell? If not, SEO can wait. Put your effort where your customers do look.
2. What would ranking well be worth? Ranking well means showing up near the top when people search. If the extra customers would more than cover the cost, keep going.
3. Can you wait about six months for a return? If yes, SEO is worth it. If not, start with something faster, and come back to SEO later.

Here’s each question in more detail.

1. Do people search for what you sell?

First, let’s define what SEO actually is in simple terms: showing up in a search engine when people search for things.

That means Google’s results and Google Maps, arguably YouTube (a search engine in its own right) and, more and more, AI answers like ChatGPT’s.

Many people hear “SEO” and think it means writing a blog. It doesn’t. Blog posts are one part of SEO, and for some businesses it may not even be an important one.

So the first check is whether anyone searches for what you do. Google’s Keyword Planner shows rough monthly searches. It’s free, though you’ll need to set up a Google Ads account. If your website is already set up in Google Search Console, Google’s free tool for website owners, it shows the searches you appear for today.

Here’s what that looks like for two very different businesses. We used Ahrefs, an SEO tool that estimates how often things are searched each month in the US, to look up the phrases each one’s customers would most likely type.

Company	Searches	Monthly searches	SEO benefit
A mechanic in Tucson	“car repair tucson”, “auto repair tucson”, “mechanic tucson”, “brake repair tucson”	About 1,400 across just those four, before counting “near me” searches	Worth it
A niche product	“custom pet portrait embroidery”	About 10	Not worth it

The mechanic is a clear yes. When someone’s car breaks down, they search for help, and those four phrases alone get about 1,400 searches a month. That’s before counting searches like “mechanic near me” and all the other ways people word it. Every one of those is someone who needs a mechanic now. Showing up for even some of them would mean a steady stream of new customers.

The pet portrait business isn’t worth it, at least for now. Almost nobody searches for custom embroidered pet portraits, about 10 times a month. Even ranking first would bring in a handful of visitors at best. People probably don’t go looking for a product like this until they’ve seen it, so its customers more likely discover it while scrolling Instagram. That’s where its effort should go.

The difference is whether your customers already know they need you, and go looking.

If not, where do your customers look?

If you had unlimited time and money, you’d do everything: SEO, social media, ads, email. That’s what big companies do. Small businesses have to choose.

• A brand built on Instagram. If you sell products to a big Instagram following, a blog content strategy probably isn’t a good use of your time. Instagram is clearly your best channel. Your website still needs to work on a phone and load quickly, and that’s about it for now.
• A bakery or a cafe. These are local businesses, so they need to show up on Google Maps when someone searches “bakery near me” or “coffee near me”. That’s local SEO: showing up for searches nearby, and it’s worth doing well. Beyond that, we’d expect them to win a lot of customers on Instagram and TikTok, where people discover new places to eat. We don’t have the numbers to prove it, but they’re visual businesses. A mechanic is different: people rarely find one on social media, they search Google when something goes wrong. So if each could focus on only one channel, the mechanic should probably pick search, and the bakery should get its Maps listing right and then put its effort into social.
• A creative or a consultant. Designers, photographers and video makers usually get known through their work on visual platforms like Instagram and YouTube. A financial consultant often does better through business connections and LinkedIn.

So be selective about channels rather than spreading yourself thin.

We do this ourselves. Machined.ai is an AI tool that helps businesses write content for SEO, and our users typically go to Google when they’re looking for a solution, so we focus on SEO first and will add other channels slowly. We don’t put much effort into Instagram, not because nobody looks for business help there, but because with limited time, search is where we expect the best return.

2. What would ranking well be worth?

It comes down to revenue. Take the searches from question 1 and do some rough math: if you went from page two of Google, where few people ever look, or from not showing up at all, to the top results and the top of Google Maps, how many more people would visit, call and book?

Here’s how that might look for the Tucson mechanic. The search demand is real; the rest of the numbers are invented to show the math. Not everyone who searches clicks a result, and you won’t show up for every search, so only a small share of those 1,400 searches turn into visitors. We’ve assumed 40.

Step	Example
Monthly searches (four terms, before “near me”)	About 1,400
Extra visitors a month from ranking well (assumed)	40
Share who call (assumed)	1 in 5 → 8 calls
Share of calls that book (assumed)	Half → 4 jobs
Average job (assumed)	$350
Extra revenue a month	$1,400 (about $16,800 a year)

Remember, this is also just one search query. Typical sites can rank for hundreds if not thousands.

Use your own numbers: your average job, how many inquiries turn into customers. If the result comfortably covers what SEO would cost you in time or money, it’s worth it. (We cover typical costs in the section on hiring an SEO company, below.)

3. Can you wait about six months?

SEO is a two-sided coin.

The downside: it isn’t immediate. It doesn’t give you feedback straight away, and it can feel like a black box. Ads are easier. You spend money, revenue comes back, and you know your return within weeks.

The upside: ads never build on themselves. The day you stop paying, the clicks stop. With SEO, you’re building something that compounds. The more you tend to it, the more it builds up over time.

The price of that upside is patience. Before you start, accept that you might spend money for six months and get little or nothing back. Sometimes it takes up to a year in a competitive market. That isn’t great to hear, but it’s honest. If you can’t afford six months without a return, it’s probably not the right time.

Is SEO dead because of AI?

You’ve probably heard that it is. There’s a real change behind the claim. In a July 2025 Pew Research study, people who saw one of Google’s AI Overviews (the AI-written answer that now appears at the top of some search results) clicked a regular search result only 8% of the time, compared with 15% when there wasn’t one. Just 1% clicked a link inside the AI Overview itself.

It used to be that you searched a question, got ten links, and clicked through to find the answer. Google slowly started showing more of the answer on the results page. AI takes that a step further and just answers.

But “Is SEO dead?” is the wrong question.

The real question is: are people still searching?

Yes.

Google says it now handles more than 5 trillion searches a year and that overall searches are still growing. That’s Google talking about itself, but we think searching has probably grown, not shrunk.

The next question: can you make changes to your site that influence your chances of getting found when your customers search?

Also yes. That’s all SEO is. So yes, SEO is still relevant.

Who’s actually hurt? Businesses that live on traffic, meaning the number of people visiting their website. If you’re a publisher earning money from ads on your pages, losing those clicks is a real problem, and it’s scary how much traffic has disappeared.

But if you sell a product or a service, the people who want to buy haven’t gone anywhere. Someone who needs their brakes fixed still needs a mechanic. You’re still competing for the searches that lead to a sale.

Showing up in AI answers mostly takes the same work. AI tools run their own web searches, and they lean heavily on the top results. In our study of 10,000 searches, about half of the websites AI Overviews linked to as sources came from the top 10 search results, and most of the rest went to giants like YouTube, Reddit and Wikipedia, not to smaller sites further down. So if you do well in regular SEO, you should, for now, do well in AI too. The weighting may differ: we’ve seen businesses that barely rank for general searches, but have a strong Google Business Profile (the listing that shows up on Google Maps) with lots of reviews, get picked up by AI anyway. And it’s less predictable. But there’s no secret new discipline.

That’s why we’d be wary of anyone selling “GEO” (generative engine optimization) or “AEO” (answer engine optimization), which promise to get you into AI answers, as a replacement for SEO. A lot of it is new jargon, and fear, used to charge more for much the same work. We explain why in our comparison of GEO and SEO.

Is hiring an SEO company worth it?

Honestly? It depends. That’s the classic SEO answer, but here it’s true.

We do our own SEO, because we know how and it doesn’t take us long. But we pay an accountant. Both jobs matter about as much. The difference is how much our own time is worth on each.

For most small business owners, paying for SEO is probably smart, because your time is better spent running the business. As for cost: in Ahrefs’ 2024 survey of 439 SEO providers, 68.8% charged $2,000 a month or less, and the most common monthly fee was $501 to $1,000.

Go in with your eyes open: you may pay for six months before you see much in revenue. So what should you see before then? A good agency or consultant should show you three things:

1. Strategy: where you are now, where they’re trying to get you, and the big bets to get there.
2. Tactics: what they’re doing each week or month to deliver that strategy.
3. Reporting: what’s actually been done, the early signs that it’s working (showing up for more searches, moving up the results, more visits from Google), and the numbers that matter in the end (calls, inquiries, sales).

You can judge the first two, and the early signs, well before six months. The final numbers take longer.

If money’s tight, you don’t have to hire anyone. Do the basics properly yourself (a website that loads fast and works on a phone, pages that say clearly what you do, and links from other sites) and you can get a lot of the benefit. You could do everything an agency does, but then SEO becomes your full-time job.

FAQ

Is SEO worth it for a small business?

Usually, yes, if people search for what you sell and you can give it about six months. If your customers mostly find you elsewhere (say, a brand built on Instagram), do the basics and put most of your effort where they are.

Is SEO dead?

No. People still search, and probably more than before. AI answers mean fewer clicks for publishers, but businesses selling a product or service still compete for the searches that lead to a sale.

How long does SEO take to work?

Expect around six months before judging it, sometimes up to a year in competitive markets. You should see work getting done, and early signs, well before then.

How much does SEO cost?

Most SEO providers charge $2,000 a month or less, and $501 to $1,000 is the most common range, according to Ahrefs’ 2024 survey of 439 providers. Doing it yourself costs time rather than money.

Can I do SEO myself?

Yes. Focusing on the basics gets you a lot of the benefit. The hard part is keeping it up every week.

So, is SEO worth it?

Almost always, in principle.

Whether it’s worth it for you right now comes down to three questions. Do your customers search for what you sell? What would ranking well be worth? Can you wait six months?

If the answers are yes, a lot, and yes, start.