If you're already ranking well on search engines, then maybe you've already done something right. Great SEO strategy brings together code, content, and context to make you discoverable and valuable to your customer.
Many businesses and brands realise that they need SEO for their website, and know the benefits they'll get from SEO work being done. If you're not one of them, then it's likely you'll be needing SEO if you rely heavily on your web presence.
SEO improves a website's visibility and searchability, but does it offer any other real value? Why is that SEO is so important?
Our 12 reasons below should help to offer your some clarity regardless of your business size.
Organic search is the most important part of most businesses web site performance. It is a crucial part of the customer funnel, and ultimately the best way of obtaining users to complete a conversion or make contact.
As most marketers are aware, Google owns a considerably larger portion of the search market than competitors like Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo , Yandex, and also many others.
That’s to not say that other search engines don’t contribute to a brand’s online visibility - it’s simply that Google owns around seventy five percent of the search market. Google is the clear-cut leader and therefore it's vital to follow their guidelines.
The remaining twenty five percent of the market is owned by other engines, and are clearly valuable to brands as well.
Google is the most visited web site on the internet, and also happens to be the most widespread email provider. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
We know that a majority of the globe that has access to the net is visiting Google a minimum of once each day to search the web.
Being visible as a trustworthy resource by Google and the other search engines is sure to add a brand’s favor. Quality SEO and a high-quality web site helps you to get there.
Any experienced SEO professional knows their primary goal is to provide an attractive web site, with a clean interface... to provide an excellent user experience. Often the thing that's missed is that finding the business online easily is also crucial to the overall experience. Being first in a search instantly builds credibility and trust.
Many things contribute to establishing authority in search engines like Google. In addition to the factors mentioned above, authority builds over time as a results of factors like:
- Positive user behaviour
- Quality backlinks
- Optimised on-page content and elements
- Machine-learning signals
Establishing that authority can do a lot more for a business than most other digital optimisation. The problem, however, is that it’s not possible to create that credibility and trust overnight, Just like in the real world, authority is attained and built over time.
Establishing a business as an authority takes effort, commitment, and patience, and also relies on your ability to provide a valuable, quality product or service that allows your customers to trust you.
Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. Few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there.
Google has learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success.
Customers know what they want. If they can’t find it, there’s going to be a problem. And performance will suffer.
A clear example of building a strong user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the SERPs (search engine results pages) for users.
The intention of that is offering users the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily.
Quality SEO incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand’s favor.
With the rise and growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental part of small- and medium-sized businesses’ success.
Local SEO aims at optimizing your digital properties for a specific vicinity, so people can find you quickly and easily, putting them one step closer to a transaction.
Local optimizations focus on specific towns, cities, regions, and even states, to establish a viable medium for a brand’s messaging on a local level.
SEO pros do this by optimizing the brand’s website and its content, including local citations and backlinks, as well as local listings relevant to the location and business sector a brand belongs to.
To promote engagement on the local level, SEO pros should optimize a brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, its Google My Business listing, and its social media profiles as a start.
There should also be a strong emphasis on user reviews on Google, as well as other reviews sites like Yelp, Home Advisor, and Angie’s List (among others), depending on the industry.
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 answer.
It’s great to have SEO tactics implemented on a brand’s website and across its digital properties, but if it’s a short-term engagement (budget constraints, etc.) and the site isn’t re-evaluated consistently over time, it will reach a threshold where it can no longer improve because of other hinderances.
The way the search world evolves, basically at the discretion of Google, requires constant monitoring for changes to stay ahead of the competition and, hopefully, on Page 1.
Being proactive and monitoring for major algorithm changes is always going to benefit the brands doing so.
We know Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a year. Fall too far behind, and it will be extremely difficult to come back. SEO pros help to ensure that is avoided.
With the always-changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the changes as they take place.
But staying on top of SEO includes being in the loop for the major changes taking place for search.
Knowing the environment of the Web, including tactics being used by other local, comparable businesses and competitors, will always be beneficial for those brands.
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.
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.
While SEO doesn’t offer the easier-to-calculate ROI like that of paid search, you can measure almost anything with proper tracking and analytics.
The big problem is trying to connect the dots on the back end since there is no definitive way to understand the correlation between all actions taken.
Still, it is worth understanding how certain actions are supposed to affect performance and growth, and hopefully they do.
Any good SEO is going to be aiming at those improvements, so connecting the dots should not be a challenge.
Brands also want to know and understand where they were, where they are, and where they’re going in terms of digital performance, especially for SEO when they have a person/company that is being paid to execute on its behalf.
There’s no better way to show the success of SEO, either. We all know the data never lies.
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 submersing 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.
It’s no secret in the world of SEO that if you’re not on Page 1, you’re likely not killing the organic search game.
A recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in nearly 40 percent of all click-throughs, while up to 30 percent of all results on Page 1 and 2 don’t get clicked at all.
What’s this mean? Two things:
If you’re not on Page 1, you need to be.
There are still too many instances when a user types a search query and can’t find exactly what it’s looking for.
