Why Is SEO The Key To Your Online Success

While companies can get up and running very quickly, getting new customers, particularly during a time of fierce competition, will prove challenging to do. 

It is where SEO comes in handy. Through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can become “searchable” on Google and other search engines. SEO levels the playing field for start-ups and long-time businesses alike. If you can land on the first page of SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you have as much chance as any other website to attract customers and get conversions. 

What is SEO ?

SEO means increasing exposure on a website to improve traffic if your pages are well-linked in search results, more customers (potential and existing).

SEO maintains the website’s ranking high in search results (SERP). Search engines such as Google have many significant internal checks in the algorithm they use to rate websites.

The algorithm is programmed to find the best websites to address users’ queries. Content marketing will help the brand and website achieve higher ranks online.

How Does SEO work ?

Search engines gather information about website pages and put them in an index. Algorithms then analyze all indexed pages to determine the order they should appear in the search results for a given query.

Search ranking factors can be used as quality indicators. It includes quality content, organic keywords, backlinks, internal links, and even UI/UX (User Experience/User Interface). 

Even a websites’ site navigation is essential to mobile-friendliness, which is also key to ranking on SERP.

You need to do your SEO right because you cannot pay search engines to get better organic search rankings. You can run ads, but to rank on SERP, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy. 

Why is SEO important for marketing?

More than 70% of search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions on the first page of SERP. If you want to gain more leads and conversions, the first page is where you need to land, and SEO helps you get there. 

SEO is about improving the usability and user experience of a website. When your website has a strong online presence and top rankings for a specific keyword, users’ trust increases. 

Good SEO strategies can put you on the map and help you keep your edge above the competition. 

It is also a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year. Search is the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Being visible in search results can have a substantial impact on your bottom line.

Google’s way of showing which sites deserve to rank high for a query is through SEO. Without modern SEO, it would be effortless to generate search results so that a site with more links or more pages always is #1. But SEO is crucial because it keeps search results fair. Search results are as close to the real world as possible so that sites appear only because they deserve to be there. High search engine rankings and hard work result in a better showing in the results.

7 SEO Benefits to Your Online Business

Additionally, many marketers find that SEO is crucial to their work. This chart shows that 50% of marketers believe SEO is the most effective digital marketing strategy.

Many business owners often overlook the value that SEO can provide to their overall digital marketing strategy. It is primarily because not everyone fully understands everything that SEO has to offer. Some of how SEO can help your business become more successful online include:

1. Organic Search Is Most Often the Primary Source of Website Traffic

Organic search is a huge part of most businesses’ website performance and a critical component of the buyer funnel and ultimately getting users to complete a conversion or engagement.

As marketers know, Google owns a significantly larger portion of the search market than competitors like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and many others.

That’s not to say that all search engines don’t contribute to a brand’s visibility — they do — it’s just that Google owns about 75 percent of the overall search market. It’s the clear-cut leader, and thus, its guidelines are essential to follow.

But the remaining 25 percent of the market owned by other engines is valuable to brands, too.

Being the most visited website in the world (as well as specifically in the United States), Google also happens to be the most popular email provider in the world (with more than 1 billion users). Not to mention YouTube is the second biggest search engine.

We know that a clear majority of the world with access to the internet is visiting Google at least once a day to get information.

Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines will always work in a brand’s favor. Quality SEO and a high-quality website take brands there.

2. Reaching a Specific Target Audience

SEO employs specific tactics designed to generate valuable metrics and data about the kinds of people looking for your unique products and services online. 

By using this information, an SEO expert will determine the kinds of phrases that potential customers are using when searching for services and products in your industry online, allowing them to optimize your website’s content to better target people in that specific audience.

Any experienced SEO aims to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search with thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.

Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. In addition to the above factors, authority is accrued over time due to features like quality backlink profiles, positive user behavior, machine-learning signals, optimized on-page elements, and content.

But establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. However, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight — just like real life. Authority is earned and built over time.

Establishing a brand as an authority takes patience, effort, and commitment and relies on offering a valuable, quality product or service that allows customers to trust a brand. 

 3. Improving Conversions & Increasing Profits

Once your website’s content has been optimized to reach a specific target market, it will become easier to convert the users who visit the website into actual customers. 

The people who are finding and visiting the website will be looking for the products and services offered. 

By targeting a more specific audience, you will also increase the value of the leads coming into the website, which means better results and higher profit margins.

4. Helping You Stay Ahead of Competitors

While making it onto the first page of Google is an integral part of being successful in an online market, making it to the top of the first page will help you stay ahead of the competition. In most cases, businesses that appear at the top of the search engine results page will have a greater chance of taking away potential customers from businesses that appear lower down on the page.

5. SEO Impacts the Buying Cycle

Customers do their research. That’s one of the biggest advantages of the internet from a buyer perspective.

Using SEO tactics to relay your messaging for good deals, groundbreaking products and/or services, and the importance and dependability of what you offer customers will be a game changer.

It will also undoubtedly impact the buying cycle in a positive way when done right. Brands must be visible in the places people need them for a worthy connection to be made. Local SEO enhances that visibility and lets potential customers find the answers, and the businesses providing those answers.

6. SEO Is Relatively Cheap

Sure, it costs money. All the best things do, right?

But SEO is relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things, and the payoff will most likely be considerable in terms of a brand’s benefit and bottom line.

This isn’t a marketing cost; this is a true business investment. Good SEO implementation will hold water for years to come. And, like most things in life, will only be better with the more attention (and investment) it gets.

 7. It’s A Long-Term Strategy

SEO can (and hopefully does) have a noticeable impact within the first year of action being taken, and many of those actions will have an impact that lasts more than several years.

As the market evolves, yes, it’s best to follow the trends and changes closely. But even a site that hasn’t had a boatload of intense SEO recommendations implemented will improve from basic SEO best practices being employed on an honest website with a decent user experience.

And the more SEO time, effort, and budget that is committed to it, the better and longer a website stands to being a worthy contender in its market.

Conclusion: SEO Brings New Opportunities to Light

High-quality SEO will always find a means of discovering and leveraging new opportunities for brands to, not just be discovered, but to shine.

Offering quality SEO to brands means submerging an SEO team in everything that is that brand. It’s the only way to truly market a brand with the passion and understanding that brand’s stakeholders have for it: becoming a stakeholder.

The better a brand is understood, the more opportunities will arise to help it thrive. The same can be said about SEO.

Implementing strong, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties is always going to be beneficial to that brand and its marketing efforts. It’s considered a “new age” marketing technique, but it’s critical to a brand’s web presence in this day and age, especially as available data and rivaling competition continue to increase and grow.

Because SEO is always changing, it’s crucial not to become complacent, or to assume that your site, in its current state, will always rank where it does. Search engines consider the freshness of your content as well as how recently other sites have linked to you. If you don’t update your content, you may not gain new links, and your site will lose relevancy over time.

Your competitors will always be working to outrank you, and search engines will always be changing. Unless you keep up with the optimization of your site, you won’t have much luck maintaining the success you find online.

So, in short, no—you should not stop doing SEO once you are successful. If you do, you’ll likely find that your success is very short-lived.

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