"if a site is built correctly" - right. That's far from a given.
I can show you dozens of examples of well-funded "A list" too-cool-for-SEO developers who have no idea whatsoever what "built correctly" entails from the POV of a search engine.
The role of SEO is a) Product Management to set requirements to optimize crawlability, indexing, and retrieval, or b) QA that arrives after the fact and highlights all the ways the site fails to be usable for bots.
My experience is if you design things right first, it costs much less than if you don't. Plus you see the upside of your efforts quickly.
But maybe some people take the attitude that "giving me traffic is Google's job" and then when they don't get organic traffic, they have to buy it. Hopefully they also enjoy raising money and giving up a big chunk of their company, too.
I can show you dozens of examples of well-funded "A list" too-cool-for-SEO developers who have no idea whatsoever what "built correctly" entails from the POV of a search engine.
The role of SEO is a) Product Management to set requirements to optimize crawlability, indexing, and retrieval, or b) QA that arrives after the fact and highlights all the ways the site fails to be usable for bots.
My experience is if you design things right first, it costs much less than if you don't. Plus you see the upside of your efforts quickly.
But maybe some people take the attitude that "giving me traffic is Google's job" and then when they don't get organic traffic, they have to buy it. Hopefully they also enjoy raising money and giving up a big chunk of their company, too.