Every business owner has heard the pitch: you need SEO. Far fewer have heard a straight answer to the question that actually matters. Is SEO worth it, or is it another expense nobody can quite explain? For years, M2 Technology sat on the skeptical side of that question. Search engine optimization (SEO) came up in every marketing meeting. Each time, it slid to next quarter because nobody could say what the investment would return. Then the team finally committed, and the results changed how we think about the whole discipline.
On this episode of IT Unplugged, Brandon sits down with CJ, co-founder of WiscWebs, the web development and marketing partner behind M2’s own website. Together they unpack what SEO actually involves, where AI belongs in content creation, and how to judge whether your website is doing its job. Watch the full conversation below, or keep reading for the takeaways every Wisconsin business owner should hear.
Why Is SEO Worth It for a Business Like Yours?
Most owners asking “is SEO worth it” never receive a plain-English definition first. So CJ opens with one on the episode. Search engine optimization is the practice of setting up a website so people find it through online searches. Behind that simple idea sit thousands of ranking signals, but he boils the real work down to four areas.
The Four Areas That Decide Your Rankings
- Site performance: How quickly your pages load, which shapes everything downstream.
- User experience: Whether visitors find what they came for without friction.
- Copy and keywords: The words and phrases on each page, matched to what people actually search.
- Metadata: The structure behind the page, including focus keyphrases, meta descriptions, and URL slugs.
Because these areas interact, a site that nails one and ignores the rest still underperforms. Google’s own Search Essentials documentation makes the same case in plainer terms: meet the technical requirements, avoid manipulation, and build for people.
Even so, plenty of vendors sell shortcuts, and CJ gets blunt about those. “There’s not just a switch that you can flip for good SEO,” he says, “because if there was, everybody would do it.” Companies that promise instant rankings or thousands of cheap backlinks are companies to avoid. In fact, those junk links often come from low-reputation domains, and they can drag down your authority score instead of lifting it.
Why can’t anyone flip that switch? Because the rules never stop moving. Google adjusts its ranking signals constantly, and tactics that worked last year can quietly stop working. Therefore, optimization behaves less like a project and more like maintenance, much the way patching and monitoring work in IT. When a vendor treats SEO as a one-time setup fee, that alone tells you how current their approach is.
M2 Technology started IT Unplugged for exactly these conversations, where an expert explains a discipline in plain language. When a topic deserves a longer look, you’ll find it on the IT Unplugged channel.
What Moves the Needle: Content, Keywords, and Backlinks
A well-built site is the foundation, not the finish line. Instead of a finished product, CJ describes growth as two habits layered on top of it. A backlink is a link from another website that passes traffic and credibility to your site. In other words, earning quality backlinks signals that other people vouch for your content.
Next comes publishing. Adding new, unique content on a regular basis remains one of the most reliable ways to grow search rankings. Each post targets a focus keyphrase inside a topic cluster, while the longtail terms you already rank for appear throughout to amplify them.
Beyond that, growth means balance. You want your total keyword count to keep climbing. Meanwhile, the terms you already own should move higher at the same time. Chasing only new terms leaves your best assets flat, and polishing only old ones caps your reach. CJ frames it as a fine balance, and it’s the reason a content calendar beats a burst of enthusiasm.
CJ also draws a line many owners miss. For example, some posts exist purely to inform your customers, and those can carry little search power even when they’re genuinely useful. Others start life as SEO posts, with validated keyphrases and deliberate structure from the first outline. Both belong on a healthy blog, but confusing the two produces content that works hard at neither job.
Standing Out When Every Competitor Looks the Same
Brandon raises a problem most service businesses recognize: to buyers, providers can look interchangeable. IT companies install the same routers and access points, so service quality differentiates you offline while search visibility differentiates you online. Although CJ admits there’s no secret sauce, his prescription is concrete. First, study what your competitors rank for and find the gaps in your own content. Then create pieces that fill those gaps so you start competing for those terms. Finally, name your genuine differentiators and put them in the copy itself. Since a keyword gap analysis compares your rankings directly against competitors, it turns “standing out” from a slogan into a to-do list.
For M2, this stopped being theory about a year in. Before the investment, search traffic barely registered. Today the company’s IT services page for Sheboygan holds the top organic position for its market. As a result, a manufacturer in Appleton or a clinic in De Pere can find the local companies serving them. That’s the part of the “is SEO worth it” debate nobody can hand-wave: the rankings either move or they don’t.
Consequently, M2 Technology now runs its blog program the same way, validating every post against live keyword data before writing a word. The rankings did more convincing than any sales pitch could.
Where AI Helps Marketing, and Where It Hurts
AI came up throughout the conversation, and CJ’s rules are stricter than you might expect from someone who uses these tools every day. His first rule never bends. “I would never publish any AI generated content without a human curating it,” he says. Because AI tools often tell you what you want to hear, confident errors slip through when nobody checks.
Strategy is where he draws the hardest line. When identifying keyword opportunities, WiscWebs relies on real search data from platforms like Semrush rather than asking a chatbot to guess. AI should never replace verified keyword data in SEO strategy and planning. A model can sound authoritative about search volume while inventing every number it cites.
Brandon adds a warning from his own experimenting: AI tends to be a people-pleaser. Because models often validate whatever framing your question carries, they’ll cheer your plan instead of stress-testing it. Instead of accepting the flattery, ask the tool to argue against you or review your work critically. Skepticism is a feature you have to turn on yourself.
Where AI Fits in the Workflow
That said, none of this means avoiding the tools. CJ’s team starts with an outline, asks AI to help organize it, and sometimes generates first-draft copy for specific sections. Different models bring different strengths, so drafts move between tools before a person redlines every line and layers in brand voice. After the human pass, the team often runs one more readability check. Ultimately, the sequence matters: AI accelerates the middle of the process, while people own the beginning and the end.
So, Is AI Content Bad for SEO?
The nuance matters here. AI generated content is not bad for SEO on its own, but unedited AI content that reads as generic can damage both trust and rankings. In fact, CJ assumes readers will spot lazy automation instantly. Buzzwords are the giveaway, he warns: copy that promises to supercharge or turbocharge your results tells readers a machine wrote it.
Finally, his closing point on the subject reaches beyond marketing. “What we use AI for is to improve client outcomes,” CJ says, “not to drive efficiencies.” That mirrors what M2 Technology tells clients about AI managed services: the tools only produce value when human expertise points them at a business result. Whether the output is a blog post or an automated workflow, the oversight requirement never goes away.
How to Tell If Your Website, or Any Technology Partner, Is Working
Before you can judge a website, you need to know its job. On the episode, CJ sorts business sites into four types, each with its own definition of success.
- Validation sites: Someone met you or heard your name, and the site confirms you’re legitimate. Success means visitors convert after they arrive.
- Lead generation sites: Built around SEO to attract strangers, so watch impressions, engagement per page, and completed forms.
- Software-as-a-service sites: Everything serves the signup, so track conversions and where visitors spend their time.
- E-commerce sites: The website is the business, and sales tell the whole story.
Notice what this framework really demands: a measurable purpose. A website is working when the metric tied to its purpose keeps moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, vanity dashboards hide that answer, and one honest number reveals it.
One more piece of the episode deserves attention from newer companies. For most young businesses, CJ recommends starting simple with a visual builder like Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress running Elementor. Since a starter site mainly needs to prove you’re legitimate, that’s the most cost-effective way to get one live. After two or three years, though, many companies outgrow the template and need a site built to generate leads. Is SEO worth it for a small business still on a starter site? Usually yes, once the site underneath it can support the investment. The jump from template to custom is a growth milestone, not a failure of the first site.
Ownership came up too, and it previews the partner conversation. Agencies commonly rent websites to clients, collecting monthly payments while keeping control of the asset. Instead, WiscWebs builds the opposite way: clients own the domain, the server, and the finished site, then choose whether to keep the builder involved. That philosophy should sound familiar to anyone who’s read about M2’s approach to pricing. Rather than a bundled flat rate, M2 separates a transparent monthly software fee from support hours you only pay for when you use them. Whether the product is a website or IT support, you deserve to know what you own and what you’re paying for.
Here’s where the episode speaks directly to IT buyers, because the same test applies to every technology relationship. If you’ve never worked with an outside IT partner, define what “working” would mean before you sign anything. If you’re already paying a provider who can’t show you what you’re getting, that fog is itself the warning sign. A qualified technology partner can always show you what you are paying for and what results the work produced. Green Bay businesses tell us that this gap, more than any single outage, is what finally pushes them to consider switching IT providers.
M2 Technology publishes its own evaluation resources in the same spirit, including a practical guide to the signs your IT provider isn’t meeting business needs. Measurement builds trust in both directions, and we’d rather show our work than ask for faith.
Final Thoughts
So, is SEO worth it? After living the experiment, our answer is yes, with one condition. It pays off the way any managed discipline pays off: through steady investment, honest measurement, and human judgment directing every tool. Nobody flips a switch, and nobody should promise you one.
Beyond marketing, the same standard applies to every technology decision your business makes. That includes the website representing you, the AI entering your workflows, and the IT support underneath it all. If this episode raised questions about whether your technology spending produces results you can see, that’s a conversation worth having. We’d start from your situation, not from a script. Schedule a free consultation and bring the hard questions.
We asked ours on the record. And the proof might be simpler than anything in the episode: you searched, and you found this page.