News Courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com:
Reportedly, only 44 percent of businesses spend time or money on SEO. That result is pretty surprising, if not inexplicable. Paid search marketing ranked just below content marketing with 47 percent responding that they used it.
Clutch seems surprised by the SEO finding as well and tries to explain why SEO ranked as poorly as it did. The company says that many businesses (and presumably, marketers within those organizations) don’t understand SEO, combined with the fact that SEO results “aren’t immediately obvious.”
Ryan’s Take 
This is a common issue for many of my clients. SEO is expensive. In order to succeed with SEO, a lot of money needs to be spent. It takes time and effort to perform outreach, build relationships, and create brand awareness for companies. If someone tells you they can get your website ranked on the first page for only a couple hundred a month, be very cautious.
The famous line from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”, does not apply to websites. You can have the best-looking website on the planet. It’s not going to get noticed by Google until trust has been established. How is that accomplished? Through a lot of hard work and patience.
Many SEO experts believe in what is called the Google sandbox. This refers to an alleged filter that Google places on new websites that prevent them from achieving high rankings for popular keywords. It is believed this ‘sandbox’ can last anywhere from 1 month to 6 months. Any SEO work done in that time frame won’t have nearly as much of an impact as it would if that website has been online for a year or more. Ahrefs wrote an excellent article on this subject if you’d like more information.
Given all of these details, it is no wonder why businesses opt not to spend money on SEO. They want immediate results. That is something that is just not possible. However, if your patient enough, the payoff is huge. Once you’re at the top, SEO campaigns can be ramped down and a return on investment will start to happen. It’ll also be easier to rank for newly targeted keywords once an established SEO campaign has been made.
