"SEO is new, it's unknown, so it feels scary & like it's a lot safer to not do it—but it’s hurting you & your business."
Part of my job as an SEO coach is having conversations with people. Some are motivating, others are insightful, & still others are filled with tough love.
For example, I often hear why business owners haven't done anything about SEO yet, whether they’ve been in business for years or just a few months.
Today, I'm bringing you a tough love conversation. I’m shining a light on 5 common reasons people keep putting off SEO—and showing you exactly why you need to toss every last one of them in the trash. 🗑️
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Why I made a last-minute change to my SEO challenge
Why SEO still feels like a giant, confusing mess
The timeline I continue to see with my clients (starting SEO → seeing results)
What I witnessed with friends & family investing in SEO agencies vs a solo strategist
What type of SEO support is best for which type of businesses
How SEO was a support for my business when I took 18 months off Instagram
How a client's business kept humming along during a surprise 3-month social media break
Why we’re drawn to posting a Reel vs getting started with SEO
What an ads person told one of my clients after seeing her website SEO
Whatever reason you've been giving yourself for putting off SEO, I hope this episode convinced you to scrap it. The sooner you get started with SEO, the sooner qualified leads & aligned opportunities can start finding you!
Ready to get found online by your dream clients?! Join the November SEO Challenge!
Mentioned Resources:
→ Sign up for the 🆓 Nov SEO Challenge
→ Join the December 5-Day SEO Sprint (⭐ Bonus disappears Nov 15th)
Related Episodes:
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Adrienne Cruz! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Hello and welcome to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Britney Hersberg. Part of my job as an SEO coach and strategist is having conversations with people. It's actually one of my favorite parts of the job. And in a lot of those conversations, I hear resistance to SEO. People tell me, either directly or indirectly, why they haven't done anything about SEO, which is exactly what I want to talk with you about today. I'm speaking to five reasons you're putting off SEO. Actually,
One reason I completely shifted my SEO challenge this month to be free is just that. I wanted to remove any barrier to entry. I didn't want you to have a single excuse not to join us, to not see where SEO opportunities are lurking on your website, in your content, and on social media, to not discover what it actually takes to optimize those pages and platforms, and how SEO can change the game for your business and start bringing leads to you. Someone searches, they find you, boom, they're in.
SEO is so, so, so different compared to social media marketing. There's a reason why so many people are starting to act on and switch over to focusing on SEO and not just saying, I'm done with social media. They're actually taking action. And to really paint the picture, I've got client success stories woven throughout the challenge. When we're talking about website SEO, you'll hear how my client showed up in 15 AI searches one month and how that brought traffic to her website. When we're talking about podcast SEO,
I'm telling you exactly how my client's been booking consultation calls and paid coaching calls in the very first month her podcast has been live, and how another client showed up in a Spotify search. The person listened to the podcast interview, joined her free workshop, and then joined her paid program, even bumped up to the more hands-on VIP option. It's not too late to join the SEO challenge. We're going the entire month of November with weekly lessons and one homework task each week.
It's a self-audit of four different SEO platforms, including your website, social profiles, and your content. All you need is the free Telegram app, which you can have on your phone or on your laptop. I'm a big fan of the laptop version. I'm sharing voice notes and links with you right in there. I will say, since you're joining in a week late to things, I would recommend getting the workbook add-on, but it's only seven bucks. The link is below, and I'll see you in there. As for now, it's time to get into the five reasons you are putting off SEO. First up.
You don't know what it is. SEO still feels like this elusive thing to you right now. And any content you're seeing about it makes the whole thing more confusing. I have seen a lot of this content and it even makes me confused. I'm like, what are you talking about? And then sprinkle in the whole AEO, G-E-O-B-I-N-G-O banana pants stuff that's going on, and it just makes things even more confusing. Feel even further away, feel even like there's more steps involved in it. But that's just not true. Thankfully,
I have a lot of business owners telling me every single week how simple and doable I make SEO for them. They say that I break down this big confusing topic. They hear me talk about it, whether it's here on the podcast, in a coaching call, in a Google Doc comment, what they actually say is that things finally click. So I know it feels like this like blob out there, but it doesn't have to. And especially if you join the challenge, you'll see very quickly how understandable it is and how doable it is. Next up.
You're stuck thinking SEO will take forever and it's only a long-term strategy. While it's true that SEO is going to help you for months and years to come, what I also know to be true, because I see it happening with my own clients, is that every business can bring in qualified leads within four to six weeks through SEO when the right keywords are used. I've even had some clients see success in as little as two weeks. Results in success, when I say that, what I mean is more traffic to the site.
More qualified leads submitting inquiry forms, and yes, even making sales straight from search, like my client Ellie. She's a virtual bookkeeper with digital products. Because she took the time to optimize the SEO strategy for those pages, her products are actually showing up in search results pages. Person clicks over and they buy. Period, the end. Ellie needed something to work quickly for her. She and her husband spent several months this year traveling around the world, including spending a lot of time in South America.
Now they're building out a van and traveling around the US. She doesn't have time to market her business on Instagram, nor does she want to. She wants to explore the local trails, go to a therval pool because it's the perfect day for it, have lunch with her grandparents because time is precious, visit local coffee shops, and spend time working on her van with her husband. She wants to live her life and know that her business is set up to essentially market itself for her. And that's exactly what she's been able to experience because she took the time to
To set up her SEO. She started in 2025 and it's been a little over a year, but she was seeing results within that four to six weeks that I mentioned. And she's not the only one of my clients experiencing this. The thing that sets my approach to SEO apart from any other one that I've seen is that I start out with your North Star. I don't give a single crap about what your competitors are doing. I want you to focus on your vision first and foremost. Who do you want to work with? What offers do you want to fill?
What do you want to be known as? How are you different from everyone else in your industry? You get clear on that and your keywords just appear. The SEO strategies build themselves and you even get clear on what you should be blogging about. It's beautiful. Another common one is that you have every reason to believe SEO is super costly. In fact, when I first started offering SEO services to clients, I actually worked with a dear friend of mine who's a dentist and airway specialist. She told me she paid $15,000 per month.
To an agency for SEO services, but they hadn't done squad. I even saw family members who were forking out thousands of dollars each month to SEO agencies. It was nuts. These business owners were not getting a single thing out of this investment. And that's a lot of money to have going out the window. So then I start to go all in on SEO, help strangers. I'm seeing the same thing. So of course you would think the same thing when all you see is people paying large sums of money and getting absolutely nothing for it. Or worse yet,
you are online and you're seeing the agencies themselves either not listing their prices on the website, which to me is a huge red flag, or listing very high prices on their sites. You're naturally going to think that's the only way to go into SEO. When I started tinkering with my own SEO after I made one tiny change that brought me paying clients straight from Google, this was one of my beliefs that I wanted to bust. And I did. I saw that I could figure out how to find good keywords for my business.
I could easily put them in the right places on my website and elsewhere. And that is what was making SEO work for me. Now I'm able to show you in a much more streamlined and thoughtful version of what I was cobbling together at the time. Then there's the fact of the matter, you don't have time to train yourself or your staff. So it feels like there's no immediate value to doing SEO. And yet, that is exactly what my SEO sprints have disproven, which by the way.
Business owners go through the sprints and their team members go through as well. VAs, heads of marketing, you name it. I've seen it be much more effective for team members to go through an SEO sprint rather than getting on an SEO strategy call with me. It's just not enough time to get on a one-hour call. So if you've been toying with the idea of either having your team member go through the SEO sprint or get on a strategy call with me, go for the sprint. Okay, that aside, I put together that offer, the sprint offer, because I wanted to prove to my clients.
That they didn't actually need three or four or six or 12 months to learn keyword research, create SEO strategies, and get it plugged into their websites. They needed to get SEO on their websites, ASAP, and then move into content creation and optimizing things off their site like Instagram profiles, and then and then eventually get into metrics tracking. It's not that SEO takes forever to do, it's that it's an ongoing process, which is the beautiful part of it actually. This is what makes it such a sustainable marketing strategy.
Unlike social media marketing, you can take weeks or even months off, like I did and my client Courtney did, and still get results, still get paying clients in the door. I took 18 months off Instagram personally. Started off intentional, but it lasted way longer than I thought it would. What I noticed is that Instagram became a place where people would reach out and say hi to start conversations in the DMs. They'd ask me some questions and want to get to know me and my offers a little bit better. So Instagram
Still worked. It was still part of my overall marketing ecosystem, but it was no longer the thing I was counting on to carry my business. And since I've come back, it's been much more fun of a place and a more social place for me. Imagine that. Courtney, meanwhile, took three months off Instagram completely unintentionally. She got sick. Her son got sick. She got sick again. It was absolutely bonkers. But guess what? Just a month before everyone was running fevers, she had plugged SEO into her website.
She had also plugged SEO in for her podcast, and then boom, whole family is laid up in bed. Of course, she didn't want to do any face-to-camera reels for Instagram or stories. Of course, she didn't even have a voice to record podcast episodes for a hot minute. But the entire time, her SEO was still working for her, and her books were still getting filled, which meant she was still able to help people get sober while her life was lifing. The last and maybe biggest hurdle I see is that people are still so convinced.
That other things, other marketing strategies are more effective. But really, it's just that posting a reel feels productive. Getting likes and you go girl comments gives us that dopamine hit, but they don't lead to anything. No new sales, no referrals, just that fun social part of things, which is great, but it doesn't help your business. Take ads, for example. Without having SEO in place first, you're just throwing money out the window. The messaging isn't consistent from the ad to your profile to your website landing page.
Things get all janky and you just end up mad that the ads didn't work. These strategies just feel easier, more accessible, more trendy, but that doesn't mean they're actually going to work as well compared to SEO to grow your business and bring in leads. In fact, remember I told you I'd closed my monthly retainer offer for SEO clients? One of them, who you actually heard from recently, therapy practice owner Lauren, met with a few ads people after our call. And she said that they were really optimistic about how the ads would perform because she had good SEO in place.
And that's not the first time I've heard that from an ads person. All of this to say, whether you're thinking ads and reels are the ultimate way to market, or that SEO will take forever to work or cost too much money, or that you have zero time to actually do SEO, they're all, in fact, excuses you now have to throw in the trash. They're just not true. SEO is new, it's unknown, so it feels scary and like it's a lot safer to not do it. But all that avoidance is really doing is keeping you the best kept secret on the internet.
And that's BS. I want to help you fix that because people need you. They are literally looking for you right now and they can't find you because you don't have any SEO in place. Time to do something about that. Whether it's joining the free November SEO challenge or the December SEO sprint, which by the way, you'll want to do by November 15th because that's when the bonus goes bye-bye. Do something. Do something about your SEO. I'll be right there with you, just like I've been for hundreds of business owners before you. Until next time.
Remember, I'm cheering you on on your SEO journey.
