SEO takes a lot of time
All that excellent content creation that is the basis of strong SEO is also a disadvantage for some marketers — because consistently creating top-notch content takes a lot of time. SEO is no longer as simple as peppering keywords all over your web page and in your meta data. And if you’re seriously crunched for resources, the content creation required to maintain a sustained SEO program may be overwhelming.
You still need to invest in technical SEO
While constant quality content creation as an SEO strategy will get you far, it will only get you so far. There are still some things that are a little out of your reach unless you consider yourself well versed in technical SEO — you know, 301 redirects, site structure, site hosting, 404 configuration. If that sounds like SEO gobbledygook, even the most steadfast on- and off-page SEO will reach a ceiling. Or worse, if you’re working on some legacy technical problems, could see no results because crawlers can’t read your site, you’re suffering from duplicate content you didn’t know about, or some other issue that’s preventing you from really taking off.
You don't have just google to think about
You know, there are search engines out there other than Google. Shocking, I know. Marketers wisely spend most of their time optimizing for organic search on Google, but the fact is there are plenty of other search engines — Bing and Yahoo! come to mind — as well as smaller, niche search engines that keep cropping up every day. This just means that there are different sets of rules to follow for each, making a truly comprehensive SEO strategy just a little more divided.
Too much is out of your control
While on-page SEO is important, off-page SEO has a bigger impact. And by off-page SEO, we chiefly mean generating inbound links. The problem is, it’s way harder to get quality inbound links than it is to practice on-page optimization. So while you can work really hard to optimize every single web page, you still have to rely on other high-authority sites to link to you, use proper anchor text, and not split the juice of that link by linking to several other sites. And unfortunately, that’s all extremely hard for you to control.
You can't measure everything
Does everyone remember the great Google SSL encryption of 2011? It made it so that Google no longer passed referral data for logged in users when those users clicked on a search result. As a result, marketers lost serious insight into a chunk of their organic traffic. Google said it would only adversely impact.
SEO requires long-term upkeep
While you may be rocking the SERPs today, if you don’t consistently put forth effort to create optimized content and generate inbound links, your rankings will slip, and all your work will be for naught. In other words, SEO is not a one-and-done solution to fill the top of your funnel.
