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Why You Need SEO - Video Summary
Search Engine Optimization = Organic Business Success
It is well known amongst webmasters that SEO can be of fantastic benefit for many companies, both small and large.
Yet, for bosses who are a little less attuned to the technical aspects of digital marketing and SEO services, it’s up to their tech-savvy employees like you to bring it to their attention.
For small and medium businesses trying to improve their organic traffic and search engine rankings, the power of SEO should not be underestimated.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it means exactly that: optimize your website to ensure you appear as high as possible in the rankings on different search engines, thus driving more traffic to your site and leading to more potential conversions.
It also helps to improve your website’s user experience, to ensure your visitors are not being deterred from your business having visited just the first page and coming away with a negative impression.
What exactly is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a method of optimizing your website’s content to increase your rankings in search engine results pages, and draw more traffic to your website.
The most basic SEO techniques help you to create the type of high-quality content that your target market (your potential customers!) are searching for, and make your website easily discoverable and indexable by crawlers from Google and other search engines.
It is a powerful method of marketing your business online, that pleases both customers and search engine algorithms.
You can make the most of your marketing budget by ensuring the traffic that is drawn to your site is targeted traffic. It ensures that the content on your website is exactly what your customers want to read.
All of this contributes to a positive user experience, increasing the likelihood that customers will visit your site again and again, building further brand awareness and loyalty.
By implementing effective SEO tactics and increasing your rankings on search engines, your website is more likely to generate leads that will actually convert to more sales.
Now, what boss wouldn’t want to learn more?
Isn't SEO Complicated to Set-Up?
For any professional who is interested in increasing their company’s online visibility, from the most experienced marketing consultant, to the novice webmaster, SEO should always be a key element of your digital marketing arsenal.
There are many online services available to help you implement it, and once the technical setup is done, much of this work takes little to no effort to maintain.
So if your company is not already utilizing the power of SEO, you may be wondering: how can I encourage my boss to open their mind to the strategy?
SEO is an important part of increasing your website’s success, and it’s your job to communicate this to your boss.
It’s crucial that you understand the SEO process, and the fundamentals of search engine optimization, to give yourself the best chance of getting your boss on board.
Why You Need SEO
For small and medium-sized businesses, ensuring a strong return on your investment in SEO marketing is crucial.
You need your budget to stretch as far as possible and get maximum results without the need to spend thousands on a large digital marketing team or consultancy firm.
That’s why SEO is a great strategy for small and medium-sized businesses. It can adapt to all types of online business and local business frameworks, and grow and adapt as your company expands.
What's In It For Me?
By harnessing the power of SEO and presenting it to your boss or team, you can be a key contributor to achieving your company’s overall goals and success.
As the team member who presents unique and fresh ideas that actually produce results, you can ensure you impress your boss and are first in line for a promotion or raise.
You are setting yourself up for success with your company, and showing you can be trusted to have the company’s best interests at heart.
You will also feel the satisfaction that comes with implementing good SEO strategies when your website traffic inevitably experiences growth and increased brand awareness.
What Can SEO Do For My Business?
SEO is a very misunderstood marketing channel, which many people believe is nothing more than voodoo magic, however, nothing could be further from the truth. SEO (when done correctly) uses actual real-life data based on your ideal customers to generate more organic revenue.
Stand out from the competition
Any online marketing strategy should include SEO as a large part of its goals and actions.
This is to ensure your chance of appearing higher in the rankings of SERPs within major search engines is increased.
Within SERPs, you are competing with many large domains that hold great authority and will obtain a large portion of those first page clicks.
SEO helps to ensure that you are using the exact keyword which is going to draw that traffic to click on your site, rather than a paid competitor or other organic listings.
A good SEO strategy can also ensure that the user experience of your site is optimized to keep visitors engaged with your content, rather than bouncing away and visiting a competitor’s site.
A good user experience is essential for any websites attempting to gain authority with Google.
Increase your market access
When you implement an effective SEO strategy, you are opening your business up to a huge sector of the market that may otherwise have been missed.
It is important to understand the user intent behind a search from a potential customer, who is looking for a product or service that you provide. This ensures that the content you are creating and publishing matches what they are looking for.
Search Engine Optimization allows you to always be one step ahead, and make it easy to increase organic traffic that will engage with your content. Increased engagement can also lead to better awareness surrounding your brand, and a higher PageRank score.
The Benefits of Local SEO
Almost half of all Google searches are performed by a user with local intent. This is a huge opportunity for growth for small and medium-sized businesses that are trying to reach a local market. Local SEO searches also provide a ‘Map-Pack’, which provides reviews, directions, and more.
Investing in local SEO will result in more traffic to your site, increasing your brand awareness and familiarizing local customers with your business name and details.
Local searches also usually correlate with a much higher conversion rate, so ensuring your website is optimized for local SEO could result in a huge spike in sales and in-store visits from customers.
Most customers performing local searches are also using mobile devices, so it is important for small and medium-sized businesses to take this into consideration when working on their optimization efforts.
Boost your other marketing efforts
By implementing a long-term strategy SEO, you will reap the benefits in many other areas of your marketing efforts.
The impact SEO has on your sales when properly implemented can be extremely worthwhile.
For medium-sized businesses, success can be boosted when SEO knowledge is increased, and taken into consideration when designing web pages or sales content.
SEO helps you to take advantage of increased market share within SERPs.
Your content is made much more visible to potential clients with search intent who are looking up your keywords.
SEO also ensures you are getting the most from your existing marketing efforts, like paid advertising, link building, and retargeting.
What if I Don't Implement SEO?
When your SEO efforts are lacking, customers are much less likely to organically discover your brand, within search results.
This wipes out any chance of building a great reputation, or of customers associating your brand with a certain product. Your website’s title and company name should be synonymous with a niche, in your customer’s mind.
This is at the heart of why you need SEO.
It is the foundation that attracts customers to your website and helps to build that all-important trust in your business.
All of this starts by implementing a good SEO strategy.
Is SEO worth my time?
When your SEO efforts are lacking, customers are much less likely to organically discover your brand, within search results.
This wipes out any chance of building a great reputation, or of customers associating your brand with a certain product. Your website’s title and company name should be synonymous with a niche, in your customer’s mind.
This is at the heart of why you need SEO.
It is the foundation that attracts customers to your website and helps to build that all-important trust in your business.
All of this starts by implementing a good SEO strategy.
What Are Some Further Benefits of SEO?
We’ve discussed some of the benefits SEO can bring to your business, yet we’ve barely even scratched the surface!
When presenting SEO as a smart marketing choice to your boss, you should be armed with every possible benefit of the strategy, and prepared to discuss exactly where it can take your business.
Read on to hear more key points that you should be including in any SEO strategy proposition to your boss.
Guide Customers To Your Website
No other marketing strategy has the potential to increase your organic traffic as much as SEO can. It ensures your website content is optimized to bring in visitors through an organic search.
Organic traffic is characterized as traffic to your website that has resulted from user searches on varying search engines. This is very valuable for businesses trying to gain in SERP rankings, and increase their domain authority.
Many small and medium-sized businesses fall into the trap of solely promoting their business on social media. The potential for growth with social media alone is vastly diminished.
The main tool which will drive traffic to your website is SEO. It will allow your business to appear in search results, rank highly for specific keywords, and provide the best user experience possible.
What About SEO for Local, Physical Businesses?
And brick and mortar store owners, don’t be fooled into thinking you’re exempt from using SEO! Search engines have the power to greatly increase footfall in your store, and make potential local customers aware of your business.
Give your website the best chance of thriving, by taking every opportunity you can to reach your business goals and maximize your potential for growth.
Build Trust Among Customers
Another great benefit of SEO which any boss would be thrilled to hear is it allows you to build on the trust established with your customer base.
SEO can make your business appear credible and trustworthy to potential clients. Most consumers will research a brand or store online before making a purchase and may decide whether or not to engage with your business, based on your website’s appearance and functionality (or lack thereof!).
A poorly designed website, or lack of genuine online presence, can be detrimental to any new or growing company, attempting to build trust among their consumer base.
Your potential buyers are far more likely to trust your brand instantly when you appear on the first page of a search engine results page. It communicates to your customer before they even click on a link to your site, that you are dependable, genuine, and trustworthy.
Make Your Brand Synonymous with Your Niche
The end goal for any business is to have your brand synonymous with your niche product or service.
When your brand appears at the top of these results, you can be guaranteed a steady stream of prospects and potential clients. SEO is the only strategy that can make this happen for your business.
This is a key point that should be mentioned when discussing the concept of SEO with your boss. SEO provides quantifiable metrics you can measure, track and present back to report on progress.
This is reassuring for any boss, as the ‘risk’ of employing a new strategy is lessened when they can closely monitor its progress.
It may come in useful to hire an SEO company or SEO professional for your business, to ensure all technical aspects of your site backend are taken care of and functioning to the best of their potential.
Show your boss that you are making the best use of the company resources, which for small or medium-sized businesses can often be in high demand.
Choosing to invest in SEO, and professional SEO services will likely provide you with a very rewarding return on this investment.
Solidify Your Brand
Building a brand, and increasing awareness surrounding your brand can often be an unpredictable and laborious process for many small businesses.
It’s difficult to know where to begin, and how to make customers aware of what your business is offering.
Search engines play a key role in putting your content in front of the people who will engage with your content, but they can only do this when you have put work into making your site discoverable.
Making consumers aware of your brand, and building a reputation that is synonymous with your niche, can take years to achieve.
When businesses do not invest in SEO, this process can feel like swimming against the tide. You feel you are offering a great product that should be thriving in the market, but no one is clicking on your site!
Or worse, people are clicking on your site and bouncing away without leaving the landing page.
Increase Your Conversions
SEO not only attracts consumers to your website, it helps push them over the line and results in more conversions for your company.
This includes offline, local conversions!
Your website is the ultimate salesperson. It is available to your customers 24/7, knows your brand identity inside and out, and showcases the best side of your products and services.
When your website appears in an organic search and is accessed by a customer, you’ve made investing in an SEO strategy worth your while.
The user is far more likely to convert their visit to a sale, when you have presented your product in a genuine, trustworthy manner to them, using the correct keywords and optimized content.
Once you have the basis of an SEO strategy established, SEO will act as a long-term marketing effort, continuing to attract customers and build your company’s rankings among search results.
To maintain your SEO strategy technically and to continually meet SEO goals, you may need to employ the expertise of professional SEO services.
Once you begin to reap the benefits of properly done SEO, this investment becomes a no-brainer.
Search Engine Marketing & SEO
SEO is distinct from search engine marketing (SEM), which is usually a paid marketing effort.
Both strategies are different but inform the same goals. Both encompass different actions to achieve those goals.
Both search engine optimization and search engine marketing use target keywords as a large part of their strategy, and focus on increasing traffic to your site.
SEO is a method of marketing that focuses on increasing the organic traffic to your site, link building to increase domain authority, and ensuring search engines and crawlers can find your content easily.
These SEO efforts underlie SEM and create a great base for your other marketing efforts. Implementing both together allows you to maximize your overall results and conversions.
SEO and SEM when used together can be extremely complementary, and ensure you are attracting high-quality website traffic that is more likely to engage with your content and purchase your product.
Stages of the SEO Process
SEO has different branches which perform various actions to optimize your website’s functioning.
The three aspects of SEO work together to optimize your content and are comprised of On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO refers to the work you do to ensure your website content and the copy can be ‘read’ by Google crawlers, and makes it easy for them to understand what type of content you are putting out.
You will need to structure your website in terms of headings, keywords, titles, headings, links, alt-tags, and other meta data.
All of these elements act as signs for search engine crawlers to understand your content and give context to the setup of your website.
Off-Page SEO
Off page SEO considers the work that you do to promote your content within search engines, outside of your own internal website SEO configurations.
This aspect of SEO can consist of building a reputation among other credible sites with considerable domain authority and doing link building work to support this.
High-Quality Link Building
Link building is a process of securing ‘backlinks’ to your website, from other credible and trusted sources.
These backlinks are a signal to Google that your site is trustworthy, and putting out useful content that users would enjoy.
This is one of the most important aspects of external SEO, and can greatly impact on your PageRank score.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that search bot crawlers can discover and index your website within SERPs.
Configuring your technical SEO settings may be complex for business owners with no experience of coding or web design, so sourcing a professional SEO company may help with this aspect of the SEO strategy.
You will likely have to perform a technical SEO audit, to uncover any potential problems with your site’s code that may impact its rankings.
Once your backend settings are configured correctly for SEO, you likely won’t have to worry about this again.
Maintaining your website and backend to a high standard is essential to ensure your site is continually discoverable by search engines.
Professional SEO Services
Consulting an SEO expert or SEO service can be a smart move for small and medium-sized businesses, to ensure their site doesn’t provide a poor user experience and implements SEO correctly. Poor user experience will instantly deter serious customers, and ultimately result in fewer conversions.
All businesses seeking to experience growth and increase brand awareness need SEO to some degree.
This is why an investment in professional SEO services, just as you’d invest in other aspects of your business, is worthwhile and shows a true commitment to your business growth.
How Do I Convince My Boss to Use SEO?
Before presenting SEO to your boss as a viable option for your online marketing efforts, it’s important to understand that the best way to convince any boss to implement a new tool, is to show specifically how it’s going to impact their bottom line.
When you’re excited about SEO, it can be easy to get drawn into discussing at length different technical aspects, like backlinks, organic traffic, and domain authority.
If you have a boss who is already reluctant to implement new strategies, bombarding them with technical jargon is not going to help your case.
Use the following tips to give yourself the best chance of success in persuading your boss.
Predict the Results
All your boss cares about is exactly what results from this strategy will produce for your company, and how many resources it’s going to take to get there.
You should take the time to explain the results you’re going to achieve and ensure these results align with your company’s goals.
This ensures your boss is invested in the outcome and gives you a realistic result to aim for.
Create a Plan
As well as discussing the intended outcome and results with your boss, you should make an effort to draw up a realistic plan and timeline to show how you’re going to get there.
Utilize visual data to explain your website’s current performance within search engines, and show what needs to be done to improve this.
Don’t go into detail explaining technical jargon. All you need to communicate to your boss is what you need to achieve, and how you’re going to achieve it.
Give your boss a realistic timeline, so you can accurately describe the resources and SEO team you’ll need, and how long you’ll need them for.
Show Me The Numbers!
Your boss may already be aware of paid digital marketing efforts your company implements, like obtaining advertisements with Google Adwords, or other paid campaigns.
You should be able to compare SEO pricing with your company’s spend on these campaigns, and the return on investment you are expecting.
Lay these figures out in a convenient, accessible way that your boss can use to plan for the expense.
The great thing about SEO is there are a huge variety of different SEO services online that you can access for varying prices. This makes it easy to present the cost breakdown to any boss.
By investing in an SEO service online, you will have access to the tools and software you need to ensure your website is optimized for search engines.
Listen to Their Concerns
Finally, your boss will likely have questions or concerns surrounding implementing something new.
It is unfamiliar to them, and they may ultimately see investing in SEO as a risk if it is something they have never done before.
This makes it your job to convince them of the benefits of SEO for your specific company’s goals and objectives.
They may have preconceived ideas of SEO that you will have to tackle. Luckily, you’ve got a lot of evidence and trustworthy sources on your side, allowing you to dispel any inaccurate ideas.
Be prepared to address any questions or concerns, and have answers prepared for the potential backlash you may initially receive.
Summary
You know your business goals and targets better than anyone else, and you can be reassured in the knowledge that SEO can help you to achieve these in every aspect of your business.
The concept of SEO is simple, and there are so many services out there to help you implement it properly into your business.
If you’re reading and relating to this article, your most difficult task will be convincing a boss who likely doesn’t understand the concept of SEO. You have to explain how beneficial the strategy can be for your website’s growth, while not making it too complex to understand.
Stay away from the technical jargon, and focus on the end result. Save the bragging to your colleagues for when your conversions and organic traffic hits explode!
We’d love to hear more from you if you’ve managed to successfully convince your boss to implement SEO. What do you think was the most effective selling point?
If you’ve got any further tips or comments, reach out to us! We’d love to hear from you.
FAQs about using SEO for Business Growth
What is SEO and why do I need it?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of optimizing your website in a way that is preferable not only to your website visitors, but also to search engines, such as Google, who can then show your website to more people in the search results.
Why is SEO so important?
SEO drives organic visitors to your website. A certain percentage of those visitors will convert into paying customers/clients (and a percentage of them will also be repeat clients). SEO helps to grow and improve the organic revenue of the business.
Why do businesses need SEO?
Unless you invest in SEO, you are more than likely going to have to waste financial resources on paid advertising, which also won’t work unless you’ve done correct keyword research, which also includes checking the search intent of each individual keyword.
How do I convince my boss we need SEO?
You have to remember that most bosses (but not all) don’t care/understand how deep the world of online marketing goes. They need to know their website should not just be a digital business card, and that it should be their top salesperson who never needs a day off.