Almost certainly not, and this includes startups that aim high as well.
Many would disagree, but I can’t help but see incentive-caused bias.
Are there exceptions? Yes, but they’re rare.
SEO will help any site get more organic traffic. However, you need to consider opportunity cost. Small businesses often don’t have enough assets for SEO to improve nor enough reach.
Here are qualities that make a business likely to find SEO value:
- Are at least midsize. This encapsulates more than several requirements. You need a digital marketing team with web developers/designers, content writers and more. Your business must have enough impact as a solution to address non-branded search demand.
- Achieved organic results incidentally. This may seem to invalidate the need for SEO in the first place. However, a good business by definition has filled some niche in the market, developing unique advantages over competitors. They have some clout. SEO capitalizes on this by reflecting the real world online.
- Have many past & active marketing campaigns. SEO needs fuel in the form of content & links. SEOs don’t create themselves, or at least they shouldn’t because they have no real skills here. Nonetheless, SEO should be able to jumpstart efforts through data.
- Don’t need quick, certain results: SEO will never save a business, and it should never be the last-ditch investment to reverse course. SEO takes time, months at least to see positive ROI. While SEO forecasting exists, it’s notoriously inaccurate and fraught with countless assumptions. However, once you offset the cost of improving SEO via consultancy, agency or in-house, the ROI can be tremendous. This also means the willingness to build tools & other functionality for marketing purposes that fulfill search intent.
- Lacks much corporate red tape. SEO dies when changes take nearly forever to implement. SEO is opportunistic & tactical. Enterprises face challenges here, despite being among the businesses most likely to benefit from SEO.
Before this appears to sell SEO short, know that organic search is still, by far, the largest marketing channel! Even small improvement here can have a large impact, and SEO best practices will develop the potential.