SEO has been a buzzword amongst digital marketers for a number of years now. Many people know what SEO is, but they don’t necessarily understand why it’s so important, or worth investing in on the scale that some do. Let’s take a look at the key reasons.
Raise Your Profile
The ultimate goal of SEO is to make your business or brand appear more prominently in search results rankings. You can’t really put a price on raising the profile of your business in this way. You will find that, as you make your way up the search results list, you eventually hit a tipping point. When you reach this point, the amount of traffic that your website receives through search engines will suddenly surge.
However, while a well-implemented SEO strategy will definitely raise your profile, you should be prepared for a long-term investment if you want to hit the very highest levels of search engine exposure.
It’s Cost-Effective
Search engine optimization is a very powerful tool for increasing a business’s profile and drawing in much more traffic to a website. When you consider just how much of an impact SEO can make on a business’s fortunes, it becomes clear what a wise investment it represents. Money spent on SEO is money invested wisely.
Provided you approach the right marketing services, sticking to those who have experience with SEO marketing, you are all but ensured good results. As long as legitimate SEO tactics are implemented properly and consistently, you should find yourself able to gain traction at a much more affordable rate than usual.
Increase Your Market Share
If you aren’t investing in an SEO strategy you can be sure that your rivals are. That means that there is web traffic going to them simply because they decided to invest in SEO when you didn’t. Online searches are how most consumers discover new businesses today. That means that they are probably the most important source of new customers for your business and one that you need to pay due consideration to.
If you want to maintain, even increase, your market share, and stay ahead of your rivals, you will need to invest in your SEO.
Associate Your Brands with the Right Terms
A comprehensive SEO strategy will increase the association between certain search terms and your business. Obviously, you will want your business to be associated with its own name and the type of business that it is. But there may also be other terms that you would like your business or website to be listed with when users search for them. With SEO, you have a degree of control over which terms are most strongly associated with your website.
If you don’t invest in SEO, however, you will be completely at the mercy of the internet, and what others write when they link back to you. This means that, even if the words a user sees when they click a link to your website have nothing to do with you or your business, it will still raise your SEO score for that term.
Google Approved
While there are other search engines out there, there is little doubt that it is Google who maintains by far the biggest market share. Most of the traffic on the internet today is generated by search engines, most of that traffic is coming via Google and their myriad services.
It is therefore advantageous to be able to take advantage of specific Google Approved methods in order to enhance your ranking and SEO score for their particular platform. It is also worth noting that Google institutes their own system of penalties for websites that are found to be using unapproved methods to enhance their SEO scores.
These unapproved methods are referred to as being ‘black hat’ techniques. On the other hand, the techniques which are approved of and encouraged by search engine providers are known as ‘white hat’ methods. It is these white hat methods that you will want to focus on. If you outsource your SEO to a third party, be sure that they only use white hat techniques. If they try any black hat maneuvers to raise your SEO score, it is your website that will face the penalties. At the very least, these will set your SEO efforts back for a while.
More Traffic Means More Profit
All of the above advantages share one thing in common, they will lead to more traffic coming to your business’ website. For many businesses, more traffic means that they will see an uptick in their sales. This especially true for businesses that sell directly to customers through their website, but any business will be able to benefit financially from increased traffic and exposure.
Just as with a brick and mortar retail store, the more people that pass through your website, the more people will end up spending their money with you. However, unlike a brick and mortar store, there are a multitude of ways that a website can convert extra traffic into profit. Probably the most common means of monetizing traffic is through advertising
For obvious reasons, the more traffic that passes through your website, the more valuable it will be to advertisers. If you’re pulling in some really serious traffic, you can charge good rates just for adverts to appear on your website. For most websites, however, a pay-per-click arrangement is more likely. Under such an arrangement, you receive a certain amount of money every time a user clicks an ad on your website.
Create New Opportunities
In the long term, raising the profile of your business and its associated brands means that you will be able to seize opportunities that weren’t there before. For example, other businesses and websites are more likely to jump at the opportunity to work with a reputable and recognizable business. This can be a real boon when you are devising a marketing strategy.
SEO can completely transform a business’s fortunes in a number of different ways. There is no other way of raising your profile that can offer the same potential return on your investment. As well as improving sales through increased awareness of your business, SEO can be instrumental in turning around the fortunes of your business. A comprehensive SEO strategy can easily end up being the difference between success and failure in the online space.
