[codingdave]

Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services.

In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices.

But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.

[alvah]

Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long-term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?

[noelceta]

Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work.

But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.

[walshemj]

Sorry that is bunkum, I see plenty of sites that cant even size and optimise images correctly - for example a mobile hero image that is 1200x800 FFS

Last month I had two huge background images fixed and we saw every page go from slow to moderate for mobile use.

[untoreh]

there is a minimum basket of SEO optimizations that are worth keeping track of and are 'natural', like proper site hierarchy, meta tagging, linking out to connected social accounts, the rest of the time is better spent on what the site is actually about.