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Why SEO should always be a part of your marketing
One of the main reasons why SEO is important is how key your SEO work is to gaining new online customers.
You can use SEO to increase your online visibility, increase your website’s traffic and achieve your business goals.
Local SEO can improve the footfall in physical stores.
The tactics businesses are using to find potential customers have changed.
Basic SEO is the new phonebook. A common tactic that was used in the world of business would be to open the phonebook and find a company providing the services you were seeking.
Often, it would be companies whose names began with A. in big, bold letters that would gain your business.
Today, we use our smart phones to perform similar search queries.
Granted, results within the search engine are not organised alphabetically and rely more on factors affecting search engine rankings, but users search for local business or companies providing what they’re looking for.
You can implement strong SEO techniques to ensure its your business that appears in search engine results pages.
A business showing up on page #2 of Google search engine results will only be seen by less than 1% of users.
Are you willing to take that risk?
If not, we’ve compiled a list of 10 reasons every business should focus on SEO.
Search engine optimization can help you improve their your online presence and increase your rankings in organic search results.
1 - SEO attracts customers actively searching for you
Another reason why SEO is important is that it can attract customers using search engines to actively search for your product.
The power of SEO is that it puts your business in front of the potential customers already interested in what you offer.
SEO can help you attract targeted traffic to your site, resulting in much higher conversions.
No more putting paid ads out and hoping the right person will see them. Or for brick and mortar stores, no more standing around twirling a sign, hoping to catch the eye of a potential buyer!
SEO is an effective way for you to introduce yourself to a customer through search engines, using target keywords to tell them exactly what you offer and why they should buy from you.
Google uses its search engine crawlers to navigate your site, understand the most important information and feed it back to potential customers.
Keywords are used by SEO professionals in their marketing efforts, to attract qualified traffic they know will be interested in their content.
Relevant keywords can be used to find out what potential customers are searching for and the intention behind their searches.
It allows you to determine where they are in their customer journey and make the most of online traffic.
By performing keyword research, you can identify the intent of the users searching for your content. SEO knowledge tells you what your prospective customer is willing to do next.
This SEO knowledge also allows you to maximise the potential of your SEO tactics, using your resources to their full potential and targeting users who are in the market for a product just like yours.
That’s the power of SEO.
2 - SEO provides continuous returns
We also understand that both SEO tools and the SEO process are an investment. When you make any investment in your business, you expect to see returns.
SEO investment is one of the most valuable marketing techniques you can utilize.
To demonstrate this, let’s take a look at two scenarios and determine where best you might spend your marketing budget:
In the first scenario, let’s say you’ve spent your marketing budget on a mixture of Facebook Ads and Google Ads, with the help of an agency. The agency does great work and sets your adverts up perfectly. The right people are seeing your business. Yet, how do you know they are not seeing your content at the wrong time? The year has ended and you’ve had some excellent results with the PPC/SEM campaigns. What do you do now that your budget is used up?
In the second scenario, you’ve invested the marketing budget into improving the organic growth of your website with an SEO agency. Just like in scenario one, the agency has done everything correct by fixing the current website issues, further optimizing, building authority, etc. Now that the year has finished, and the budget has been used, what happens? You’re still ranking on page #1 for those important keywords!
Organic search and SEO are long-term investments that, over time, will pay off and provide more returns in the long run than PPC marketing campaigns. SEO works to attract the right customers at the right time.
Once your site gains traction in search engines by using SEO services, your growth can be exponential.
Investing in paid search campaigns only lasts for as long as you’ve got a budget. SEO is the only way to attract more traffic, using less resources.
Investing in search engine optimization instead brings more traffic over a more sustained period of time. SEO rewards are not always instant and do require some work to maintain.
Yet once you gain higher positions in the rankings of Google and other search engines, you can remain there for a sustained period, building brand awareness, gaining more traffic and standing out from local businesses. Your conversions can also be improved.
As you can see, the benefits of SEO for online businesses can be immense. Using SEO to optimize your site not only rewards you but also rewards your potential customers, by introducing them to stellar content over longer periods of time.
3 - SEO organically builds your email list
Another reason why SEO is important is that it can help you to organically build your email list. An email list is one of the most helpful resources a small business can use to provide value to their customers.
The individuals on your email list have already shown an interest in your content by subscribing.
This means your job of selling your product, or persuading them to take a look at your content, is much easier. Using SEO techniques can help you to build a strong email list.
When you operate your business online, you may find it helpful to offer site visitors a free piece of content that encourages them to carry out a conversion action.
This could be asking them to sign up to your email list to receive a free helpful guide or coupon code.
This customer has likely found your site through organic web traffic. Your SEO efforts have done their job!
To encourage visitors to sign up further, you can also ensure to optimize your landing pages that offer email subscriptions to your customers.
Optimizing your on page SEO by using keywords and putting in link building efforts, can make your site more valuable to search engines.
SEO allows you to draw more people to your site through organic search, create higher-quality content and users are more likely place enough trust in you that they won’t hesitate to give you their email.
They won’t want to miss out on any of your optimized content.
4 - SEO allows for reverse engineering of competitors
Another reason why SEO is important is that it can allow you to gain a deeper insight into the SEO practices of your top-performing competitors.
Whenever our SEO consultant interacts with a client, it always amazes them to see how much data we can uncover from their website alone.
We can uncover a vast amount of data before gaining any access to a client’s website, either via their CMS, Google Analytics, or another access point.
Clients are even more excited once we reveal that we can use these same tactics to find out why their competitor is ranking higher than them in the Google search results for a particular keyword.
This allows us to reverse engineer a competitor’s entire website and figure out exactly what they’re doing right.
Of course, creating high-quality, unique content that aligns with your brand values and engages your customers is a cornerstone of digital marketing.
It is one of the key methods used in search engine optimization that attracts more website traffic.
However, relying on content alone doesn’t cut it in today’s digital market. Remaining attuned to your competition and determining their strengths and weaknesses can help to inform your own SEO strategy.
Let other sites make the mistakes for you, learn from how they practice SEO and use this knowledge to your advantage.
Reverse engineering your competitor’s SEO is important to stay ahead of them in organic search results. Identifying those sites that perform well and figuring out why can help you build up your performance in search results.
You can also link in with an SEO professional who can help you carry out a thorough competitor analysis, using SEO best practice and the right tools.
Reverse engineering your competitor’s content may just be the next step in enhancing your website’s performance.
5 - SEO allows for digital word-of-mouth advertising
A tried-and-true method of advertising is through word-of-mouth, which still has value in the digital age.
The success of this tactic relies upon the fact that when you hear raving reviews (or negative reviews!) about a product from someone you trust, you’re far more likely to place value in their opinions than that of a paid advertisement.
The online world has changed how people interact with each other and how they interact with businesses, but you can still use the power of word-of-mouth advertising to improve your search engine optimization efforts.
The quality of content you create is a powerful factor in how shareable that content is. Users can share content they find helpful with their friends through social media sites.
When your content is concise, clear, valuable and easily-consumable, it’s far more likely that those reading it will share it.
If your website users refer your content to their friends, you are already benefitting from digital word-of-mouth! This type of advertising is more engaging and can build stronger brand-consumer connections.
Most people are active on at least one, if not more, of the major social media sites. You should take advantage of this in your digital marketing efforts.
Ensure your business is active on social media and engage with your followers, strengthening their confidence in your brand and making them more likely to share your content.
Not sure where to start when it comes to creating optimized content? We provide SEO content writing services that can look after that for you.
6 - SEO gets more clicks
The value of SEO in organic traffic should not be underestimated when compared to paid advertising. Consumers are smart and will spot a paid ad from a mile away.
Even though paid ads can ensure your website appears at the top of search results, Google has clearly labeled it as an ad. Organic search results will always receive the most clicks.
While paid advertising still has value and can help you cover all angles of digital marketing, users trust search engines more than they trust ads. They place more stock in organic search results than in paid advertisements.
An SEO professional can help you to utilise both paid ads and SEO tactics together, ensuring you maximize your clicks.
Most small online businesses have limited marketing budgets. Paid advertisements may not even be an option for you when trying to attract your target audience.
While large companies can spend millions on advertising and may see fantastic results when doing so, SEO strategies can help you as a smaller business to get the same results without the large budget.
Developing a powerful SEO strategy can help you attract qualified traffic, get the ball rolling with conversions and ensure you rank higher in search results.
Using both short- and long- tail keywords also helps you to attract new customers.
Putting the efforts in to maintain your SEO stands to you for many years to come and the investment required can be significantly less than that required for paid advertising.
7 - SEO reaches customers at all levels of the buying cycle
Another benefit of SEO is that you can engage customers no matter what stage of the buying journey they are in.
Many businesses refer to these as separate parts of the journey as top-of-funnel (TOFU), middle-of-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU).
So how can you capture the attention of a potential customer no matter what stage they are at?
Let’s look at buying headphones as an example. You can clearly see from the examples below that there is a tremendous opportunity to appear to potential customers at all stages of their journey.
TOFU – (Start of customer journey): This customer may search for a term such as ‘Best Headphones With Noise Cancellation’.
You can determine from this search query that this customer is at the start of their buying journey. This allows you to optimize your website blog content to align with the information they want to know. You may choose to detail the main points of the various noise-canceling headphones that you have available to order.
MOFU – (Middle of customer journey): This customer may search a term such as ‘Review of Sony WH-1000XM4 Headphones‘
You can determine from this search query that this customer is at the middle of their buying journey. This is where you can optimize your blog content to answer their query. You can provide a review specifically for your product and even include a video for further demonstration.
BOFU – (End of customer journey): This customer may search for a term such as ‘Buy Sony WH-1000XM4 Online‘.
You can determine from this search query that this customer is at the end of their buying journey.
Ideally, your eCommerce product page will appear to them so they can purchase from you. This can be easier at this point as you have likely already built trust with the consumer.
BONUS TIP: If you don’t have the time or equipment to make product review videos, use an unbiased YouTube review, such as below.
8 - SEO generates trust online
Another SEO important benefit is that it can help you to build trust in your brand.
The more your content is shared and the more positively you contribute to your link building efforts, the more people become used to seeing your company as trustworthy and well-liked.
This also creates a positive impact for your brand in search engines.
Improving the trust in your brand can see your growth improving massively.
This is also a helpful way of utilising SEO to improve your website traffic without having to rely on paid advertisements that only serve to interrupt the experience of your customer.
SEO allows potential customers to choose to visit your website from organic search engines, rather than being forced to view your content through ads.
Giving your customer the element of choice already gets the brand-consumer relationship off on the right foot, before they ever visit your site.
Becoming a trusted source that provides valuable, credible information does not happen instantly.
It can take time and effort spent in the SEO industry to learn how to build that relationship with your customer, but trusted reviews and quality backlinks help to kick-start this relationship.
SEO also builds a stronger user experience within your site, adding to its trustworthiness. SEO can help to improve your site speed, contribute positively to link building and add to the experience of existing customers.
An SEO important benefit is that it improves your rankings within SERPs, making you more trusted by the SEO community and allowing potential consumers to put faith in your brand.
9 - SEO is proven time and time again to be successful
The success of SEO has previously been proven by many local SEO and digital SEO campaigns. The data existing around SEO success is undeniable.
Most web designers will install Google Analytics before handing the final design of a website over to a client, which is a powerful data tool. It can show clients where their SEO efforts are generating results.
Many businesses can initially be scared of SEO.
The concept may be foreign to you and appear intimidating. You may even find more comfort in staying with traditional marketing methods, such as TV, radio or print advertising.
As times change, your business needs to keep up to be successful.
We can understand that if tech intimidates you or you do not consider yourself tech-savvy, the many elements of search engine optimization can be intimidating.
Thankfully, our clients have always been grateful and benefit from us taking the time to explain the SEO process to them, in an understandable way. SEO doesn’t have to be intimidating.
Being on the same page as a client is crucially important to the success of any SEO campaign.
We combine this with years of experience and use proven SEO methods that always provide positive results.
10 - SEO is used for long-term success
The long-term success and growth of your website currently relies on your SEO marketing efforts. Search engines have the power to make or break your website.
As your business grows over time, your website should follow. Search engine optimization is a digital marketing method that can grow with your business and be adjusted as you need.
SEO also allows you to rank for more keywords within search engine results, helping you to send positive signals to search crawlers and begin to build more backlinks to your website, which will give Google the positive off-page SEO signals it wants to see.
Business owners want to see growth and return on investment right away, so it can be frustrating to wait for SEO efforts to produce results.
A key feature of SEO that business owners can overlook is patience.
Although sometimes you will quickly see spikes in organic traffic, SEO is considered an ongoing, long-acting digital marketing strategy that produces lasting results and gains momentum over time.
Summary
If you are in a position where you recognize the importance of investing your marketing budget towards a long-term, continuous return on investment, then choose SEO.
Once you have the correct ‘Goals’ configured in your Google Analytics account, reporting on your SEO success and seeing results is incredibly easy to do.
If you’d like to discuss these points further and tailor them specifically to your website then book a call today to spot some SEO opportunities.
