We all know about the advantages of SEO, but what are some of the down sides of SEO?

• 1) Getting noticed by more than your target audience. As you get more visible online through SEO so your competitors will start to notice and they may well up their game to compete.
• 2) Over Success.
• 3) Black Hats and White Hats.

Well I guess, SEO generally refers to all ISP's, but I increasingly observe its more or less limited only to Google.  Looks like Google has set the industry standard for other to follow.

I do not know whether this is a good trend in a society where we have embraced competition as key to success. Looks like Google enjoys a Virtual Monopoly. We increasingly become compliant with Google standards rather than industry standard.This could be a major challenge for all digital marketers might need to overcome.

This is a good question. 

In my point of view, the downside of SEO is that website owners will write content for the search engines, not for people. By doing this, the websites become overloaded with a mess of content that the user may not understand. 

To give you a precise example, there is an SEO rule that the industry keyword should be used by 3% and the search engine will normally consume the first 500 words in any web page. Suppose you want to use the word SEO too much so that the search engine will rank your page first. Normal articles will be something like:

"SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization where you optimize your website for search engines to consume".

However, to follow the above 3% rule, website content makers will write something (in-humane), such as:

"SEO is good. SEO is something you will need. Do you need SEO? SEO is the future. To use SEO, you will need to have good understanding of SEO. SEO is the best. You need to be happy if you decide to apply SEO. SEO is the best SEO in the SEO world of SEO's"

If you got my point, in the second paragraph the user will not understand anything. The paragraph is simply empty of useful information, however, the SEO writers have to write such non-sense paragraphs so that search engines would rank them higher when a user searches for the word "SEO". 

I'm sure you searched for something and you ended up reading non-sense that contains lots of the keyword you used to search for it. Right?

Some of the downside of Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) are;

1. If you invest in SEO the return of investment will take a bit long. 

2. It's not a free and cheap platform which can be used by any organization

SEO mainly gives an exaggerated picture of a company. SEO used to give a positive frame of the company in the past, but these days people do not fool by finding a company at the top of engine searches. They go more deep into the details and easily can judge who is who. 

Below i am going to share cons of SEO - 1 - Getting noticed by more than your target audience 2 - SEO Result will take time3 - SEO has no guarantee for results4 - SEO Provides You No Full Control5 - Risk of being penalized

SEO is the process of improving the reputation, user experience and quality of a site or blog for search engines so you get more traffic.

* It takes more time to rank in google.* SEO doesn't guarantee lifetime position for your domain* It's a never-ending process you need to optimize, build links, share content, check the competitors backlinks and Repeat. 

It's a optimisation that never ends, so the continous nature is definitely a downside

SEO can't be standardised and the dynamic nature of today's markets makes it difficult to cope up

Campaigns at times have to be based on quite a bit bit of assumptions-which may fail down the line and have unforeseen impacts in SEO process

Prioritzation of campaigns often fail to see upcoming and swift paradigm shifts

At times, too much faith on SEo to grow business is a potential downside

Negative keywords - this can have a big impact on results.

Removing a lot of negative keywords can also diminish your campaign

Bidding less than your competitiors - its a guessing game

Explaining to senior management why SEO may not always work

You're always analysing results and making changes - it's a never ending scenario.

Downsides of SEO:

1) Need to wait for a long time to see ROI

2) Time-consuming, I mean it takes a lot of time to achieve the desired results.

3) Has to live at the mercy of google algorithm

Downsides of SEO:

• Lot of analysis needed
• Search engines becoming tricky (new algorithms)
• Lot of competition as it is free sourse and sorce for converting customers (staying fresh, getting new links, improving da, disavowing low quality, bad links, targetting high search volume keywords, making content look enaging to improve time on site), 
• Take lots of time (no gaurantee, no control over the results),
• CTR always matters to stay ranking in top positions
• negaitive SEO (fix this by doing regular link auditing)
• lot of myths from experts, (like link building died, content playing role etc), and many more but not so considerbale

donot worry guys, SEO have to face many down times, but be brave, there are always a fix, we are always valued.. no matters. (automation never work with seo's),

we need to belive only people can solve peoples problems, not the robots, and its true people always  search for solutions on search engines these days, and seo is the only possibility to provide sources for that solutions through searchengines.