Search engines like Google are designed to rummage through billions of online content and then provide you with the top results they consider the answer(s) to any search query. This is mainly what Search Engine Optimization entails; when your business appears on the first page of search results, it will significantly help increase your total visibility and drive additional traffic to your website, for free! SEO is the most suitable and affordable marketing campaign to ramp up brand awareness, ROI, and expand your customer base.
Here are 10 reasons why your business needs SEO to scale up.
Increase Brand Visibility
The total web traffic your site will receive is largely dependent on your organic search traffic share. Organic searching significantly contributes to your website’s overall performance, buyer funnel, and user engagement with clients which can result in sales conversions. Google occupies a huge chunk of the search market compared to other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. With this premise, you can see that getting acknowledgment from Google will considerably increase the visibility of your brand and the products or services you offer. Getting this kind of visibility from a reputable resource like Google will always benefit your brand and/or business. A high-quality website and good SEO will boost your rankings and help you get in front of customers. Regardless of how good your content or services may be, without organic web traffic, prospective clients won’t see you. And there will always be an incentive to show up higher than your competitors.
SEO Establishes Credibility & Trust
The objective of any business or brand is to cultivate trust and establish credibility with its customers. A large part of this trust will bloom by doing the groundwork of creating an appealing site that encourages user experience and can easily be found in major search engines. Things that can help develop that trust with customers on Google include:
- Positive user experience
- Trustworthy content
- Secure online experience
- Quality backlink profiles
- Optimized website elements
Note that you won’t build credibility and trust overnight. You’ll have to earn it over time.
Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
If you undertake the SEO campaign yourself, other than the time you’ll commit, SEO won’t cost you as much as other marketing options like pay-per-click ads and influencer marketing. Take the time to learn SEO best practices, as SEO will help you save thousands of dollars by not spending it on blindly advertising to everyone. Web traffic obtained from organic searches is essentially free as search engines continually crawl your website and promote pertinent content based on the topic and demand from searchers. With the traffic being free, all your costs will go to strategy and execution.
Reach A large Pool Of People
Whereas most marketing strategies concentrate on a distinct target group, SEO can assist you to reel in anybody with related intent, regardless of where they are in the buying funnel. If you focus on certain keywords instead of demographics as you would with social advertising or PPC, you can appeal to more leads who may be in the market for your business.
Make a list of target keywords you’d like your business to be associated with by search engines. Also, do competitive keyword research within your niche to see what your competitors are doing, their keywords, backlinks, and employ this information to build a more comprehensive SEO marketing campaign for your brand.
Assists To Rank Better In Local Searches
For you to connect with leads in your area, your brand should be visible in their vicinity. Local SEO optimizes visibility in a certain location and enables individuals who are actively searching for your business to locate you easily and quickly and make a purchase. Local searches almost always lead to sales conversions.
Provides A Competitive Edge
This is yet another reason why your business needs SEO if it’s to survive a super-competitive world. The online business landscape is filled with unavoidable and unforgiving competition. For this reason, you should invest in SEO heavily to raise your rankings in major search engines and increase market share. Search results on Google’s first page receive more than 90% of the clicks for any given search, which is why your site needs to rank high, particularly if your direct competition is on the first page. Additionally, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, has fast loading times, and creates the best possible content to have an edge. SEO allows you to get a competitive advantage over bigger players in the market.
It Improves Website Usability
SEO is not all about ensuring your website is accommodating to search engines. Google has also been recently focusing heavily on user experience and interaction with your site. Getting them to click on your pages from search results isn’t enough, they want to make sure they’re sending their users to a website that will satisfy their needs. They should remain on your page(s) and interact with your content. A high bounce rate or little time spent on the page indicates that users can’t locate what they’re looking for, making them leave and lower site performance. To enhance site usability, focus on having a solid site structure and user interface including quality content, qualifying Core Web Vitals, and improved page load times. These will help search engines surface your content much higher.
Get Quantifiable Results
Web Analytics & SEO tools allow you to monitor fluctuations in rankings, traffic, and conversions. Google Analytics gives a detailed rundown of site metrics, enabling you to get down to the nitty-gritty aspects of your site. For instance, you can track a user’s journey through the buying funnel – including keyword searches, the pages they visited, and actions they took. This information will allow you to optimize your SEO marketing strategy to ensure users are finding what they’re looking for with minimal effort on their part.
Boosts User Engagement Rates
Your engagements with clients shouldn’t conclude after a sale. You want to build a loyal customer base that is willing to share their experience with others. SEO helps you optimize your site to make it more user-centric, useful, interactive, and shareable. To boost user engagement rates, you can make the site mobile-friendly and use other online platforms to establish your digital presence. If you make it easy to share your content on social media platforms, have downloadable content, encourage reviews, or even a newsletter sign-up form can all be great ways to boost user engagement.
SEO Is Long-Term
Impactful SEO strategies don’t take effect immediately. It will require some patience since it’s configured with the long game in mind. Think of it as an anti-spam measure, to avoid untrustworthy brands from making it to the top overnight. You need to be consistent over an extended period of time before Google begins to surface your content and improve your organic rankings. With a strong marketing strategy foundation, your site will steadily rise through the ranks and be among the top searches for longer. Effective SEO will help in future-proofing your business.
Final Words
Every business, whether small or large, needs to make SEO a priority as they grow and evolve online. The reason why your business needs SEO is to get qualified leads, streamline the buying funnel, and build trust with audiences all at the same time. All this is integral for a successful online marketing campaign.