12 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO
During the pandemic, businesses are going digital, working towards improving their business and surviving in this challenging economy. However, not all companies have made this transition yet. Many organizations know the importance of SEO, and they have a strategy in place for it. However, they don’t see the importance of SEO in digital marketing.
SEO is excellent for improving a website’s overall visibility and ranking on search engines, but what other value does it offer? Why is SEO so important?
In this article, I will share 12 reasons why SEO is so important and explain its benefits. These points will help you understand why your need to go digital with your product or service. But before we dive into the topic, let’s do a quick recap of “What is SEO?”
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process by which companies and people can improve the visibility and scalability of their websites on search engines. There are many search engines other than Google. However, Google has the highest search engine traffic among its competitors. Hence, most SEO techniques are focused on improving ranking on Google. While most marketers believe SEO is merely targeting keywords and making backlinks, the latest updates of Google algorithms have changed this paradigm. The benefits of SEO given below will draw a clear picture for you.
12 Benefits of SEO You Didn’t Know
SEO offers several advantages to small businesses:
1. SEO Is the Primary Source of Web Traffic
Organic searches play a considerable part in boosting revenue for most businesses. SEO is one digital marketing activity that increases your brand’s visibility and boosts your market credibility. There is someone out there searching for your product or service. With the right SEO strategies, businesses can capture potential buyers and even explore untapped markets.
Marketers understand the importance of SEO and how it affects brand authenticity. Potential customers assume businesses to be credible once they have reached the 1st page of Google search. From there, websites that rank higher are considered to be more close to the user’s search terms. Users assume that these businesses are more relevant because Google’s algorithm prioritizes websites based on users’ search terms.
2. Google Also Focuses on User Experience
All brands seek to improve their organic ranking. However, only a few have realized that Google prioritizes user experience. Over time, Google has learned to distinguish a good user experience from a bad one. This Google update means that businesses only focusing on SEO through backlinks and keywords won’t receive much attention if their website’s interface and functionality aren’t up to visitor’s expectations. The user experience factor has been included on Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs to provide relevant information to users in a few clicks. If the user experience isn’t good enough, web visitors will navigate to other websites, and your SEO performance will suffer. Good-quality SEO ensures the website being optimized has an excellent, intuitive, easy-to-use interface and works properly.
3. Focus on Local SEO
With an increase in mobile traffic, local SEO has become a way for small and medium-sized businesses to improve their website visibility. Local SEO means incorporating keywords focused on your vicinity, like “best dentist in Lubbock, Texas.” These SEO strategies help small and medium businesses to rank among large-scale organizations. Otherwise, companies that have dominated SERPs cannot be overtaken so quickly.
Moreover, businesses can get into details with local SEO by focusing on specific towns, cities, and regions. Local SEO might narrow your target audience, but it boosts your SERPs ranking for these localized keywords. Small and medium-sized organizations use this strategy to increase their web traffic. After getting enough web visitors, they change their approach to focus on high competition keywords.
4. SEO Facilitates the Buying Cycle
Customers do their research before making a purchase. Many brands invest their SEO efforts in writing blog posts and articles that target their customers’ queries. Since Google is focused on delivering results that answer its users’ questions, such SEO efforts receive a lot of traffic. Moreover, when brands share information about their product or service, web visitors believe these brands to be credible. Hence, sharing information affects the buying circle positively as customers learn everything about the product from its seller.
Finally, brands must be visible to people at different marketing touchpoints. One of the best examples of this is local SEO, as users who search for “Best lawyer in Fort Myers,” find multiple websites immediately that cater to people living in this vicinity.
5. Always Stay Updated
SEO best practices involve always being updated. Staying on top of things help companies revamp their SEO strategies as per Google updates. Otherwise, maintaining the same position would be hard when a new update is introduced to the Google search engine. Google makes thousands of algorithmic changes in a year. Falling too far behind might put your business at the point of no return. However, staying updated and making changes as they come can keep you afloat in the digital sea, and hopefully, stay on page 1 of Google.
6. SEO is Cheaper
SEO costs money. Still, its cost is comparatively cheaper in the grand scheme of things. Compared with Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, SEO is significantly inexpensive and generates better results.
Once your website starts ranking on Google, the SEO efforts can be focused on only maintaining the rank rather than continually striving to reach the first position. A good SEO strategy will last longer than most paid campaigns, and further investment in SEO yields better results.
7. Speed Matters
Aside from keyword targeting and backlinks, Google also measures your website’s speed when ranking on its result page. As a business owner, your customers must never go to your competitor. Therefore, site speed is critical for keeping visitors on your site. Users tend to leave a website that takes more than 2 seconds to load.
Moreover, Google will always rank your website low if its speed isn’t optimized. There are plenty of online tools to check your website’s speed both from desktop and mobile devices. Optimizing your website’s speed depends on numerous factors. It would be best to have a good web host, and your site needs to use compressed images.
Sometimes, JavaScript can make your website heavy, and customers with a poor internet connection have trouble navigating on your site. All of these hurdles are shared in report format by online speed measuring tools. You can optimize your website according to help SEO efforts.
8. SEO Is Quantifiable
Quantifying SEO is not as straightforward as a paid advertisement. However, with proper analytical tools, web owners can track the performance of their SEO team. You can use Google Analytics and evaluate the traffic you receive every month. Since SEO efforts take more than six months to show noticeable results, you need to measure monthly and decide whether your strategies are going in the right direction or not.
Quantifying SEO results requires a few technical skills. The data is not straightforward and presented on a single screen. SEO experts have to scour through multiple tools and take past and present points that reflect your website’s performance. Accumulating and quantifying these results help set targets and measure the success of your SEO campaign.
9. SEO Drives Offline Sales
It’s a common fact that customers research the product or service they are interested in. If you run a brick-and-mortar store, you can leverage SEO techniques and drive your sales. The strategy is straightforward, and it involves taking help from content marketing.
When customers search for your product or service regarding a question, your blog posts or articles can address their query. This exposure will increase the number of customers for your offline store. Once brands note significant traffic on their blog posts and articles, it gives them an incentive to take their business online.
10. SEO Helps in Gaining Market Share
Most new businesses or disruptive market ideas tend to shy away from SEO as they believe there aren’t any keywords that will match their service. According to Oberlo, Google processes 40,000 search queries in a second. Meaning users are always creating new keywords. The best part of doing SEO for a unique business model is that such businesses can gain first movers advantage.
When disruptive market ideas work on their SEO, they tend to address keywords indirectly linked to their product or service. With enough time, such websites become market leaders and dominate the first page in Google search results.
11. SEO Builds Trust and Authority
Not only can small businesses generate massive sales through SEO, but they have a strong chance of gaining trust and authority in the market. The new generation relies on Google search results to decide which business is better than the other. If your SEO strategies are not ranking your website on the first page, you can face a severe decrease in your sales.
Increasing your Google ranking is synonymous with authority and trust because your competition or other business will start sharing your content. When your website content is shared, Google will understand that your services are credible. As a result, Google will boost your rankings for specific keywords you are targeting.
12. On-Page SEO Is Relevant
Most businesses that focus on improving their search engine rankings are caught up in off-page SEO. However, having a good on-page SEO is equally essential. On-page SEO is auditing your website from internal errors. Sometimes, links are broken or lead to the wrong page. Google analyzes all websites on the internet in response to a search query. If your website has broken links, repetitive canonicals, or doesn’t have a proper site map, your SEO efforts will be in vain. It will affect your site’s user experience, and Google doesn’t prefer ranking such websites.
The Bottom Line
SEO is more important for your business than you might have anticipated. The rising internet proliferation rates have led many companies to go digital. Moreover, according to Forbes, COVID-19 has increased internet usage by70%, which is the best time for businesses to work on SEO strategies.
Finally, SEO is the cheapest way to rank your website on Google. Although businesses have to pay the cost of hiring an SEO agency or a team, the overall expense is significantly low compared to its massive advantages. The points mentioned above are a few reasons why your business needs SEO. Once you explore the vast opportunities created by going digital, you will learn that SEO is more critical than most marketing practices.
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