Today’s “digital consumers” bank heavily on search engines to find almost everything, from restaurants to retail outlets to services of sorts. In other words, no matter what your offer or manufacture, your audience will probably search for a product or service like yours on multiple search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
So, what should you do to attract them to your website? Improve your visibility on search engines. And for that, you would need search engine optimization, abbreviated as SEO. You might have heard of this term if you have already explored a bit about digital marketing. But before shedding light on its importance, let’s see what SEO exactly is.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a collective term for all the strategies used to improve the website’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking or where and how it shows up when someone uses search engines to find something.
SEO involves many areas and typically involves discovering the keywords and phrases that your target audience uses to search for products or services that you and your competitors offer, and thereafter using relevant search query terms (or keywords) to boost your SERP rankings.
Does every website need SEO and what some of the benefits of optimizing your website? Let’s find out.
Why SEO is So Important
These days SEO is a critical component of any marketing strategy and every website needs to pay attention to latest SEO developments.
Below are some of the benefits of SEO that will prove that if you’re serious about growing your website or business online, you need to be serious about optimizing it for search engines.
Helps Establish Your Brand
While branding is usually considered more of a conventional marketing strategy and SEO being largely about digital space, they both involve similar steps.
Brand building requires taking into account what you offer and how people perceive it. Interestingly, The steps involved in site optimization follow the same pattern. Ir requires content development that appeals to your audience to attract leads and customers.
To achieve this, you can find relevant keywords and develop content that can build the desired image of your product or service. All your online marketing materials, content, graphics all should work together to strenghten the image of your brand you’re trying to build.
Optimized Website Brings More Traffic
The goal of SEO is to improve your SERP ranking. However, the actual intention is to attract more and more traffic and precisely, to convert it into relevant leads and real customers.
There are myriad examples of businesses achieving a phenomenal increase in their web traffic, entirely through SEO.
No Need to Pay for Ad Space:
Probably, the biggest benefit of SEO is that you don’t have to pay for Traffic.
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Consider how conventional advertising works: You select a location – on TV channels, radio stations, or in magazines and dailies – where you want your brand to be displayed. Then you pay for the media house for placing your brand on the basis of display duration or the number of issues displaying your brand. The moment that specified period is over, your brand stops appearing, eventually generating no leads for your business.
Next, consider what appears in search engine result pages (SERP). The 1st two listings depict pay-per-click (PPC) ads, signified by the green “Ad” tag. While PPC is quite similar to conventional ad campaigns as it requires you to pay to secure this space, it is different in that you only pay when a visitor clicks your ad –something that gives it an upper hand over other means of traditional marketing.
However, the listings below the 1st two are organic results, and the sites appearing in it haven’t paid anything for being ranked in the SERP. The websites would have certainly invested money and time on creating and ranking on these spots, but they are appearing on the first page only because the search engine’s (Google in this case) thinks that they offer more value to users.
Enables Your Target Audience Discover your Website
A recent report suggested that just over 60% of consumers rely first on search engines to learn about a new product and service, and nearly 40% use them when they want to buy. The survey also depicted that over 45% of consumers prefer visiting the official page of a product/service before buying it.
SEO brings your business in front of your audience when they actively search for anything related to your business. And the sheer fact that how frequently people use search engines for product/service information offers extensive opportunity. Hence, SEO helps you strengthen your digital footprint and improves your business’s online visibility.
SEO Helps Builds Credibility & Trust
The internet has dramatically transformed the sales and marketing process. The Internet now offers exhaustive information to consumers on the options they have before they turn to sales representatives. And, SEO is one way to add to that information. By including social proof features like testimonials and case studies and making sure users can find it when they search for your business will guarantee to customers.
The results can be even better when you combine SEO with content marketing. By creating and sharing informative content, you can build credibility and trust with your prospects during the important research stage.
SEO Enhances User Experience
Google always endeavors to offer the best possible results to their users. Simply put, its algorithm-based updates are always aimed at bringing those sites to users that not only offer great content but ensure delightful user experience.
Factors like page speed and mobile-friendliness now play a major role in website rankings. With the right SEO, you constantly try to improve your website-specific user experience, which has a direct effect on conversions.
Local SEO Leads to Increased Traffic, Engagement& Conversions:
With the continued surge in mobile traffic, local search is now a crucial deciding factor. The success of local SEO helps widen and improve your digital presence in a specific geographical area,
When you combine optimizing local SEO with setting up your listing on multiple local review sites, such as Yelp, you will ensure that local users can quickly and easily find you when they’re in the area.
As you can see the benefits of SEO are well worth the time you invest in learning and applying it. A non-optimized or poorly optimized website will guarantee that very few users will find your online. So if you want to succeed and not spend a fortune on running the ads, learning SEO is critical if you want to achieve success online.
