One of the most cost-effective ways to improve the visibility of your brand in search results is to make use of SEO services. SEO helps you to not only optimise your website for different search engines, but also helps enhance the experience for users visiting your website. Whether you are a new business or an established brand, investing in SEO is of the utmost importance to drive web traffic and boost search rankings. Below we have listed some of the points that will help you better understand the importance of SEO for businesses and help you make an informed decision.
A. What is SEO and How SEO Works?
Short for search engine optimization, SEO is one of the digital marketing strategies that help drive organic traffic to the website while improving the brand reach. It helps optimise the website through targeted keywords that help increase brand awareness, making it easier for existing & potential customers to find you online.
From the search engine perspective, SEO makes it easier for bots (search engine crawlers) to crawl your web pages and index them accurately. The index pages are then analysed based on algorithm factors, which helps determine the ranking (or the order) a page will appear in the SERP for a specific search query.
Unlike paid ads, SEO helps a website rank organically on the search result and is a long-term strategy. It is categorised into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The benefits of SEO include increased visibility, higher ranking & traffic, improved click-through rates, increased dwell time and decreased bounce rate.
B. Importance of SEO For Businesses
1. SEO Helps Build Your Brand Online
When it comes to building a brand online, SEO plays a vital part. Through SEO, businesses can build brand recognition, authority, relevance and trust. When your site is optimised for search engines, you can organically gain higher visibility in the search results. It helps make your brand look more trustworthy, especially if you are a new business. SEO also helps improve user experience through several factors such as high-quality content, website loading speed, H-tags, meta description and mobile-friendliness. All these contribute to building your brand, thereby making it memorable.
2. SEO is Rooted in User Intent
Unlike other digital marketing strategies that are mostly based on a sales pitch, SEO is rooted in user intent. It attracts prospects to the website by providing engaging & relevant information that a user is actively searching for. This helps build meaningful relationships with the site’s visitors, thereby helping you build a stronger brand. It not only helps drive targeted traffic to your website, but also helps streamline the conversion process. In fact, according to a survey, 70% of respondents said that SEO is better than PPC at generating sales.
3. Builds Trust and Credibility
With 87.76% of searches done on Google, getting your website to rank organically in the search result through SEO can help you build trust among customers. When you rank in the top positions in the SERPs for any search query, it automatically helps boost your brand’s credibility – as users trust Google. The goal is to provide a quality and consistent user experience through valuable content. This will help you build authority online, making you a well-recognised brand that users come to trust over time.
4. Stay Ahead of the Competition
Through SEO, you can analyse your competitors and gain an insight into the strategies working for them. From keywords to backlink profiles to on-site content, all these will help you improve your marketing efforts. Competitor analysis helps you to understand what your competitors are doing. This can help you identify potential opportunities where you can outperform your competitors. It also helps monitor changes and industry trends that you can implement on your website, thereby ensuring you always stay ahead.
5. Better Online Visibility
SEO is the ideal way to boost online visibility and garner targeted web traffic. SEO makes it easy for your target audience to find your products and services online through right keywords and user intent-based content. The goal here is to maintain the consistency and quality of the content, which will help increase your website’s overall searchability & visibility, driving leads that convert to sales.
6. Drives Organic Traffic
To build a sustainable online business, driving organic traffic to your website is important, and this is where SEO can help. Organic traffic comes directly from different search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Unlike paid traffic that stops at the end of a paid promotional campaign, SEO can drive organic traffic consistently through techniques such as content, keyword optimisation, business listing, creating a diverse backlink profile and featured snippets.
7. Higher Ranking For Targeted Keywords
Another advantage of SEO is it can help you rank higher on the SERPs for targeted keywords. It is done by incorporating relevant keywords & phrases in your web pages and blog posts. You can use an SEO audit tool to get a list of targeted keywords for each web page or product on your site. Next, you need to create/upgrade content using these keywords. For new content, after it is published on your site, you need to promote it on your social media accounts to boost visibility. This will help you rank higher on the search result for that particular keyword.
8. Easy to Measure
One of the best benefits of search engine optimization is that it is a measurable marketing tactic. Right from traffic, bounce rate, CTRs, to content and conversion, all SEO metrics are measurable. This ensures that you can continuously evaluate different strategies and improve/refine them to get better results.
9. Long term Digital Marketing Strategy
SEO delivers long term results. A website that implements the best SEO practices will get long term benefits. This is the reason why SEO for businesses is often considered as an investment rather than a cost. With smarter algorithms, consistently ranking for targeted keywords can be a challenge. With SEO, you can be assured that your website is up-to-date and aligned with the latest SEO trends.
10. Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Technique
As already mentioned, SEO is an investment rather than a cost that provides higher ROI in the long term. This makes it the most cost-effective digital marketing technique when it comes to improving website traffic and ranking on SERPs.
11. Boosting Local SEO
Local SEO optimisation focuses on a particular city, town or region. For example, dentists in Surrey or a web design agency in Surrey. With the rapidly growing numbers of mobile internet users, targeting a specific audience that belongs to a particular area can help improve your ROI. Most importantly, according to statistics, 97% of users make use of the Internet (Web) to find local businesses online. So, the stats themselves speak of why SEO is important for business.
12. Generates Quality Leads
While the primary aim of SEO is to boost a brand’s visibility online through organic techniques, it can also help you generate quality leads. It is done through keyword research and the implementation of target keywords across the website. Writing informative and interesting content can drive targeted leads to your website. Advanced SEO, including outreach and link building, are a few other ways to obtain leads. Plus, by conducting a technical SEO audit of your website, you can identify issues (lack of CTA, contact form not working) preventing leads from converting into sales.
13. Enhanced Conversions
SEO is one technique that not only makes your site accessible to search engines, but also helps improve the user experience. It ensures better search rankings and increased organic traffic. By having a strong SEO strategy, you can easily improve your conversion rate.
Further reading: Reasons Why WordPress Is the Best CMS for SEO
14. Drives Offline Sales
As more and more consumers use the Internet to find local businesses, you can easily optimise your website with local SEO to drive offline sales. This includes updating your Google My Business listing, adding a call extension/Whatsapp button to your website, creating geo-specific content and optimising existing content for voice search. Adding reviews, ratings, and customer testimonials to your website is another way to drive targeted traffic. All these will help you convert customers who have a strong intent of making an immediate purchase – be it a product or service.
15. SEO Leverages Social Sharing
While there is no direct impact of social media on SEO, it can help promote your content, increase brand awareness and create link building opportunities. SEO helps you to optimise content across social media sites, including title tags and descriptions. Social signals such as likes, shares, and comments can help build trust and customer loyalty, which will help increase website traffic.
16. SEO Beats Paid Traffic
As already mentioned, SEO is the most cost-effective tactic to get consistent website traffic compared to paid ads. As soon as you discontinue your paid campaigns, you will see a decline in your traffic and rankings, so in the long run, SEO provides much better value for money. It can help drive steady website traffic, which can increase with time.
17. New Opportunities To Collaborate
Through advanced SEO strategies such as outreach, guest posts and link building, businesses can also generate new opportunities to collaborate with influencers in their niche. This will help generate referral traffic from different websites. It can boost brand recognition and help you reach a wider audience. The best part, it can help you establish authority in your niche market, which, in turn, can help you improve your Google authority.
18. Provides Continuous Results
SEO for business is a long term strategy that will help drive web traffic and improve ranking over time. It is not a quick fix like paid advertising to generate leads. You can see the impact of well-written and optimised blog posts years after it was first published. Likewise, the results from guest posts and outreach can also help you build your website’s domain authority over time. And all these can contribute to making you a market leader in your niche.
Levi Armstrong
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