Although the main objective of SEO is to make corporate websites faster to find when a potential client searches for specific keywords (i.e. located higher up the list of search engine results), it also has other, more specific advantages for businesses.

One of the main additional advantages is that SEO is more cost-effective than any other type of internet marketing. SEO strategies grow from the initial time and energy invested in them to work passively later on; in other words, at the beginning a business works on SEO, and later SEO works for the business, requiring far less maintenance than other internet marketing tools.

SEO also influences other corporate media channels, such as social media profiles (affecting how search engines 'see' them), and this influence is likely to increase in the future. This is due to the fact that, as search engine algorithms become more and more refined, they no longer perceive corporate websites as just websites, but rather as parts of a larger network of media belonging to that particular business. This means that a lack of SEO harms a company's position with regard to other platforms as well, and good SEO strengthens them