What Is SEO Used For?

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2021 and adapted it to English in 2026.

To bring in potential customers.

It's true. People may talk to you about brand positioning, branding and other benefits, but the real reason to do SEO is to bring customers to your online business that you can then turn into sales.

What Is SEO Used For in Marketing? #

What is SEO used for? Well... It's like putting your physical store in a busy, well-known shopping mall.

Sure, you could open a business in your bedroom, but who the heck would know you have a store there?

That's why physical stores set up shop in commercial areas.

To gain visibility.

If you put a physical store somewhere most people don't know exists, or worse, somewhere not a soul walks by, you'll go under in no time.

Your sales will be crap, and you'll say: having a store is useless.

It's the classic case of someone who builds a website and doesn't do any SEO on it.

A while ago I read a fellow SEO on Twitter saying something like: whenever a new client tells me they have a website, the first thing I ask them is, who visits it?

He said most of them answered something like: well, my brother-in-law, my kids, my wife, you know, everybody!

That may sound funny, but it isn't.

The truth is, that's the case for the vast majority of people. Whether they're entrepreneurs with a physical store who want to take their business online, ecommerce stores, AdSense or Amazon niche sites, or any website out there.

Lots of people hire a web designer to get a "cool website" and think that's enough.

Careful: I'm not putting down designers. I'm just saying a cool website without SEO work behind it is useless.

And that's how a lot of people end up thinking having a website is useless, because it doesn't sell.

In a nutshell: if you have a website and you don't do SEO on it, it's like having your physical business in the middle of your bedroom.