With an influx of marketing strategies available for companies and businesses, it’s challenging to make out which ones are a great fit for your company. SEO is a vital part of your strategy if you’re aiming to achieve a robust digital marketing strategy. Without an efficient SEO strategy, a website cannot appeal to its target audience to build a substantial online presence. Additionally, a website will also fail to attract the targeted traffic necessary to sustain a business and attract new customers.
In simple terms, SEO is the practice of using search engines like Bing and Google to market your business. Even though search engines like Google offer paid advertising options, you can still take advantage of what search engines offer without having to pay for ads. In this post, we’ll cover the role SEO plays in marketing and what benefits it can provide your business.
What is SEO Online Marketing?
In recent years, SEO has emerged as one of the best marketing strategies out there because of its effectiveness. Even though the results take a while to kick in, it’s worth the wait. But what is search engine optimisation or SEO? SEO is a process of refining your website and online presence. Optimization includes both off-page and on-page efforts to refine rankings in search engines. If your website ranks higher in search engine results, it will increase more clicks from users. Remember: the higher the clicks you receive, the more people view your website.
Additionally, if more people view your website, the more they can find a service or product they’re after. Combining both on-page and off-page strategies with SEO helps to get the job done. Ideally, on-page SEO includes the changes you can physically change to your site to increase its ranking. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to the strategies that don’t take place on your site to improve your ranking.
You Don’t need paid Ads in SEO
Google’s search algorithm ranks search engine results based on what it determines to be the best results for a particular query. Once you’ve created a page the search engine deems relevant in directing users to, you can continue to attract traffic to your website. This happens for months or years after publishing your content. Writing top-notch quality posts and researching requires a significant investment. You can invest in the form of time if you choose to create it. You can also create one through money by hiring an online marketing agency to create one for you. However, once you’ve made the initial investment, there’s no recurring cost to keep attracting traffic to your content. However, you will need to update your website every once in a while. Ideally, this depends on your topic’s nature.
SEO Brings Tangible Results (Leads and Traffic)
As we’ve mentioned, SEO increases traffic to your site. A good SEO strategy will help your site rank higher on the first page of Google search results. These results are relevant depending on the keywords of your business. For instance, if your business is a restaurant in New York, SEO can put you in the first results for “restaurants in New York.” This helps in bringing web traffic relevant to your business. Increasing relevant traffic to your site can increase brand awareness and recognition, bringing in customer leads. In the long haul, you can turn such customers into potential paying clients. The takeaway here is that SEO can help you get targeted traffic based on keywords relevant to your business offers.
Helps Build Credibility and Trust
Developing real authority can and will affect your business positively. But, this will not happen overnight. As a business, you need to labor on earning authority over a while. On the bright side, efficient SEO can help your business build confidentiality and trust in the eyes of Google; this leads to more traffic. Ideally, there’s a solid belief amongst users that an acceptable business can always be found on the first page of Google. Your potential customers will see your website having higher authority when it ranks higher for the appropriate keywords. Eventually, this leads to more targeted customers that convert into sales.
Local SEO Searches
As a local business owner, your business can suffer because other companies out-compete you, and SEO is no different. It can be challenging to reach out to those closest to you with today’s highly competitive online domain. You can use tools like Google My Business as they’re extremely useful. Once you’ve signed up for a profile, you will also need to consider how your website is built. It should include mentions of your location and embedded maps, which gives search engines the chance to figure out where you are. Using Google My Business, SEO can rank your business in the map pack, which is visible in the widespread majority of local searches.
SEO Aids in PR
Even though PR and SEO seem like different marketing strategies, you can combine them to improve the results you see from each. The primary connection between SEO and PR lies in link building. Earning links from top authority sites is a vital element of any SEO strategy. The biggest challenge of an SEO professional’s job is to identify opportunities for placements or coverage. This may include news publications, industry blogs, and other relevant sites. Since a PR strategy pivots around getting prominent influences and publications to talk about your brand, this presents a mega opportunity. You should use link-building research to discover new ways to get your brand recognized by customers. This way, you’ll be more effective in distributing content to potential clients and customers.
Increases Visibility
One of the vital functions of SEO is increasing your brands’ visibility. This means making it easier for prospects to find you when looking for something your business offers. Ideally, visibility is directly linked to your ranking. The higher the ranks on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely people can see you and click through to your site. Additionally, the more efficient your SEO efforts are, the higher the visibility and ranking. This is critical, especially if you consider that many web users never click past the first SERP.
SEO Brings in More Business Referrals
Digital marketers know ranking on the first SERP of Google for targeted keywords helps you attract potential prospects. As we’ve mentioned above, the higher you rank, the more attention your brand gets. However, another hidden advantage of SEO is that it helps your business get on conventional businesses’ radar. These are companies and businesses that aren’t in direct competition with you. But, they might have an audience or potential customers that complement yours. This means you can have such businesses contact you and even give you referrals. Ideally, their referrals are bound to be more consistent and bigger. For instance, let’s say you run a graphics design business. You can have a digital marketing agency pass you referrals, or they can white-label what you offer and package it to sell with their own. You have limitless possibilities when you partner with other businesses, and efficient SEO helps in this.
Search Engines are Sometimes Error-Prone
It’s worth mentioning that SEO is vital because search engines aren’t perfect. This means you need to take critical steps to counter their failings. If you don’t, be prepared as your website will pay the price dearly. For instance, if a website doesn’t have an appropriate link structure, search engines may not crawl and index the site correctly. This leads to low rankings.
Additionally, coding errors can hinder search engines completely, making it difficult for your site to rank regardless of how much effort you put into other SEO efforts. Other areas where search engines encounter issues include forms, images, duplicate pages, semantics, and language.
Millions of People Search in Google Every Second
When you incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy, you are marketing your business to millions of people – over 65,000 every second. Using SEO to market your business makes your services and products available to a vast user base. This gives you a higher opportunity of attracting potential customers and increasing your conversions. Without the help of SEO, it will be unlikely that your audience will ever get to see your site, let alone buy your products.
SEO Provides a High ROI
Compared with other marketing strategies, your business can achieve a high ROI at a much cheaper cost. There is a myriad of reasons why SEO has one of the highest ROI. One of them is that it allows you to connect with the right people at the right time. SEO is an inbound marketing strategy that works by allowing you to market directly to your target audience. Most people don’t mind SEO because they hardly notice it. Good SEO makes your online marketing journey easy as potential customers reach out to you instead of searching for them.
You read this post because you want to understand how SEO can help your business. Since we’ve explained what you need, it’s time to implement it. As a brand, try and approach your marketing campaigns differently. Many successful businesses incorporate their campaigns together. This ensures there’s always something that pushes their leads a step closer to converting into a customer. Over to you!
