Why SEO Is Beneficial For Business
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most popular marketing techniques used to help businesses become more visible online. What business wouldn’t want more ‘free’ traffic arriving to their website? SEO improves the overall searchability and visibility of a website, but let’s have a look into the actual value that a high ranking website will produce.
Opportunity
You only have to carry out a quick Google search to see how many results appear, and how quickly. There are over 40,000 every single second, which equates to 3.5 billion searches per day! Think of all that traffic you could be missing out on if your website is not visible on search engines. The opportunities are endless, particularly if your business is in the top spot for keywords related to your industry.
Building Trust & Credibility
It is a known fact that consumers trust brands more if they appear within the first couple of places on search engine results pages. The higher your business appears, the more that Google values your website and the content it displays. Google will crawl your website and if it feels users are more likely to have a better user experience than on a competitor website, you will rank more highly.
Long-Term Strategy
One key thing to understand about SEO is that you won’t be at the top of Google overnight, it takes time. That being said, the impact of higher rankings will generate long-term results. Even a website that hasn’t particularly been optimised for keywords will improve from the implementation of some of the basic SEO practices. Of course a website that has a good user experience is also going to rank highly.
Better ROI Than Ads
SEO is a little trickier to track the Return on Investment as opposed to Google Ads where you can attribute a set conversion (action taken on the website) to a visible spend. However, with SEO you are able to track increases in rankings, traffic and conversions generated from organic traffic. You can also drill down into specific demographic information using Google Analytics too which can give you more data for your SEO campaign.
Brand Awareness
SEO also helps to raise awareness of your brand. If you start appearing on page 1 for your target keywords, your website will become more visible to potential customers who haven’t heard about you before. Just like with SEO, trust and credibility can’t be achieved overnight. The more your pages and content rank highly on search engines, the more opportunities you have for potential customers to see your content and associate this with your brand.
Increased Touchpoints In The Buying Cycle
We are all guilty of carrying out research before purchasing a product (particularly if the product is high value). This means that being visible to your customers once throughout the buying cycle isn’t going to be enough. You need to ensure that your brand is at the forefront of their mind when the time is right. Local SEO in particular helps to let potential customers find the answers to their questions, as opposed to creating a hard-sell.
Compete With Big Companies
When it comes to paid marketing, such as Google Ads, you are never going to be able to compete with the big guns and their corporate budgets. SEO is the second best thing, and allows small businesses to compete on a larger scale. By focusing on a niche market, you can quickly increase your visibility on search engines for your keywords, helping to drive traffic to your website. SEO is a cost-effective tool to help small businesses leverage and compete with some of the bigger players.
Better User Experience
User experience is a huge ranking factor nowadays. Google prefers websites that are mobile-friendly and have the right mixture of text and photos/videos. By optimising your website for search engines, you are automatically helping to improve user experience. So it is a win-win in Google’s eyes! A great user experience means more trust between the customer and your brand, which ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.
So there you have it; a whirlwind run through why your business should be implementing SEO as part of its marketing strategy. Ranking on page 1 of Google is essential if you want to target those who are actively looking for your products.
