If the fact that more than 3.5 billion searches are made on Google everyday doesn’t raises your curiosity and convince you why SEO is important for business. I wonder what will!
Why SEO is important for your business?
Although Google is getting stricter with each passing year through its advanced search query algorithms, the entire idea is to make searches as relevant as possible. In short, giving users exactly what they’re asking for.
While the entire phenomenon revolves around trending SEO practices and link building efforts obeying the ongoing algorithm updates.
It is vital for companies to understand why SEO is important for their business if they’re to stay prominent within their target audience, improve their website’s overall searchability and visibility, acquire relevant traffic, and land eventual leads and conversions.
As for this discussion, we’re not going to waste our time on discussing the routine, tiring basics, but talk about the importance of SEO and some case studies to give you a reality check.
Organic search is the primary source of traffic for your website
Apparently, one of the foremost principles on why SEO is important for business, especially for small business and startups.
Organic search has always been a crucial part of the buyer funnel, and a mighty indicator of a website’s performance. Apparently, it eventually leads to engagement and conversion.
As we know, Google acquires around 75% of the search market amongst other competitors like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and more. However, that doesn’t mean that other search engines doesn’t contribute from their end, but Google’s lion’s share makes it important to follow its guidelines against all odds.
Besides being the most popular search engine, Google is also the leading email service provider worldwide with more than 1 billion users. Not to mention YouTube, one of Google own subsidiaries, is the 2nd largest search engine.
Therefore, we can safely say that all your competitors are already sucking in organic traffic that also could have yours.
Related content: 8 Best SEO tips to Increase the Organic Traffic of Your Website
Being prominent in the eyes of Google through powerful SEO practices is always going to do wonders for your brand. You just need to understand the dynamics of organic search and how to capitalize opportunities of landing your website on the first page.
Building trust and credibility is all you want
Any experienced SEO professional knows what it takes to complement and build on a beautifully designed, aesthetically pleasing website through trust and credibility.
The idea is to create and facilitate a top user experience whenever a user lands on a website and navigates through its various digital aspects.
Google and other search engines value authority for a website to be ranked higher, among other factors. You can build authority through optimized on-page content and elements, quality backlinking, encouraging user behavior, and vital machine learning signals.
Yes, authority can be more decisive than most, if not all, digital marketing efforts.
Also, keep in mind that there is no ninja, killer or explosive strategy that promises to build your website’s authority overnight, but patience and consistent efforts in on-page and off-page SEO, link building, guest blogging, and associated activities are the things that work hand-in-hand to create trust and credibility for your brand.
Moreover, trust and credibility are a significant part of a positive user experience. Something that Google truly favors as it is becoming more of an answer-based engine over a search engine.
Google intends to help users acquire the answers to their queries in the fewest clicks possible. Hence, quality SEO activities are up for grabs to help with that accomplishment.
Local SEO accounts for better engagement, traffic, and conversions
Local SEO, as the name suggests, optimizes your digital efforts for a specific region.
As mobile traffic is getting increasingly common now, it is proving to be a runaway success for many small and medium-sized businesses as people are able to find your business in a quick and easy manner.
Local SEO activities focus on specific region or areas and create an approvable medium for brands to work through.
While the work left on the SEO professionals is to optimize their website and content, backlinks and local citations, and local listings tailored to the location or state they want their brand to operate and produce results in.
As a starter, you may begin with optimizing your brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, social media profiles, and Google My Business listing.
Moreover, also pay close attention to the user reviews on Google and review-specific websites like Home Advisor, Yelp, etc.
Influencing the buying cycle
Customers never skip the research day! Hence, any buyer’s journey always has a great head start in collecting and sorting data online.
Therefore, using SEO to market your product and services, and making customers to rely on your brand can prove vital. In other words, if done right, you have the capacity to impact the buying cycle like never before.
Your brand should be where the customers expect you to be. And using local SEO to improve your visibility, and letting customers find you makes you an important part in their buying cycle.
SEO practices keeps updating
SEO isn’t a one-stop-shop where you visit once, design your website, produce content accordingly, and lay back to see your website stay at the 1st page of Google for the rest of your life.
It’s a constant hustle to stay updated and keeping your website in front of the visitors’ eyes, otherwise risk reaching the threshold where your website’s improvement becomes stagnant.
It is mainly at Google’s discretion how and what you need to do to stay on its 1st page. Hence, always stay on the lookout for major Google announcements, particularly algorithm updates responsible for ranking fluctuations.
Form the “P” extensions in the name of Pirate, Payday, Pigeon, Panda, etc. to the current date Core updates, stay informed to keep your SEO game optimized at all times.
A relatively cheaper prospect
Sure, any digital marketing activity costs some money! But SEO is relatively cheaper as compared to several other branding approaches and the resources at stake.
Rather than taking it as a marketing expense, consider it a long-term business investment. Apparently, SEO is a slow, yet promising option to uplift your online brand reputation.
SEO is like any other natural phenomena, the more you feed, the more it booms for your business.
A strategic roadmap
SEO is often considered a long term strategy, with results normally becoming visible within a year of execution. And several efforts can continue paying off for your business for years to come, if taken consistently.
However, also remember that market trends and consumer behavior change continuously. And your SEO game needs to adapt accordingly to stay afresh.
Even though content and SEO run hand-in-hand, but basic SEO practices can improve your website and user experience even if it hasn’t been driven by powerful content marketing efforts from the beginning.
While the more consistent and honest is your time and effort investment, the better your chances to establish a strong foothold in your niche.
Easy to calculate
Although, most organic marketing efforts aren’t as straightforward to calculate as with paid search, but analytics data and reports can make it a whole lot easier.
One major problem that marketer often struggle with is trying to fill the gaps in the back end as there is no defined way to understand the association between all the actions taken throughout a campaign.
But, this doesn’t mean we’re not making an effort to examine how certain activities influence the overall performance and growth of your website. And any smart SEO expert should be able to bridge the gap between all the actions taken.
It doesn’t matter if you’re working for someone else or running your own brand, it is your duty to know where you are, where you’re headed, and what’s in store for the future.
Yes, data mirrors your website’s performance, and so yours capability as a professional digital marketer.
Not being on the 1st page? You’re not gaining clicks
Agreeably, one of the easiest reasons to understand why is search engine optimization important for your business. Given the competitive bar higher than ever, if you’re not reaching the 1st page, no one’s clicking your website to see you.
It has been shown that the first three names in the SERPs captures around 40% of all the clicks, while the 30% of the remaining ones in the 1st and 2nd page never get clicked at all.
The thought is not to scare you, but a firm reminder to reach the 1st page, if you’re not until now.
Case studies—how big can be your SEO game?
The above reasons will become more convincing once we discuss some real-life case studies on how companies have benefited by SEO.
Here are few examples for you to take inspiration on why is search engine optimization important for your company.
Northmill
A Swedish Fintech company, before using SEO, Northmill registered just 127 views on an informational piece regarding tax returns.
The major concern was that the content they wanted to expose to their audience was invisible, and users who were seeing weren’t converting.
After a thorough keyword research, the company optimized their content according to their users’ exact search queries and witnessed a surge in their rankings.
This is a partial chart giving a holistic picture on how optimized content can drastically increase your website’s traffic through SEO efforts.
Growth.pro
A digital marketing company in Malaysia scored a 50% increase in leads for a learning center franchise brand.
The client approached Growth.pro to uplift their organic search metrics, and here are the results they reaped through appropriate SEO efforts.
As a result, each dedicated page started to rank for hundreds of brand and location-specific keywords, service/product and location based keywords, and service/product and “near me” keywords. Not to mention, the client happily stated how they are getting high enrollment figures and lead conversions for their franchisees.
Ahrefs
It is a well-known SEO tool today, but hasn’t been popular back in the day.
In 2015, the platform was able to land around 15k visits per month, but became stagnant even after publishing 3 content pieces each week.
When the new CMO and Product Advisor joined, Tim Soulo focused on quality instead of quantity. And after harnessing the power of content marketing, now Ahrefs publishes only 2 blogs per week, but with 10x traffic numbers.
From Ahrefs’s approach, we can clearly conclude that if you want to work on increasing the organic traffic for your business, focus more on creating content on queries the users are actually typing in the search engines, and less on hot, fad topics that are rather short-lived.
Final thoughts!
This concludes our guide on why SEO is important for business and a brand’s overall digital marketing strategy. Nevertheless, we’ll be studying advanced aspects of SEO in depth with further posts to come in future.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a business owner, the potential of digital marketing, especially SEO, shouldn’t be undermined.
Remember, this digital age requires a digital approach to hone your web presence and business. And the data acquired from organic marketing can help you make informed, intelligent decisions and stay ahead of your competitors in the fight for service and user experience supremacy.
