Maintaining a solid online presence is crucial for any business. As the world continues to fight against the pandemic, most businesses have had to rely on online channels to stay afloat, especially small businesses. One of the most important channels in the online world is search engines. BrightEdge reports that 68% of all online experiences begin on a search engine. Yet, as per Backlinko, the first five search results attract 67% of the total traffic. So, unless you appear on the first page of search results, your business won’t get much attention. This is where the benefits of SEO come into play.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means optimizing a website based on a list of factors that search engines consider when ranking webpages. If you want to appear on the first page of search results, your website needs to be optimized for all the factors.
4 Benefits Of SEO
SEO should be an important part of every business’s marketing strategy, regardless of size. Before you learn how to optimize your site, it’s important to know the benefits of SEO.
1. Helps You Reach Your Target Audience
One of the most popular SEO strategies is content optimization. By doing this, you can rank for popular keywords (search queries) that relate to your website. For example, if you want to rank for the term “what are keywords”, you can optimize a blog for that keyword.
How do you select the right keyword? Keyword research! This entails using a platform to see how popular keywords are, how well they convert, and what the competition is like.
If you can optimize your content for the right keywords, your business will succeed in reaching consumers interested in your offer. Try and choose keywords that will reach customers at every stage of their buyer journey. This includes awareness, consideration, and decision.
2. Offers long-term results
Traditional marketing, while effective, poses one big challenge – it is short-lived. You need to keep putting money in to reap the rewards. Running print ads or getting an ad spot on TV is expensive and only effective for so long.
Don’t get us wrong! SEO isn’t free, either. However, it offers long-term results. As long as you continue to monitor and tweak your online presence, it will improve. SEO ROI is much better in the long run than paid digital campaigns.
At the same time, it is important to note that SEO takes time to show results. We advise that you opt for a mix of different types of marketing efforts.
Let’s say you run a car dealership. During the launch phase, invest in traditional marketing to boost product awareness. As your business grows, focus on SEO for car dealerships and optimize your website for the right keywords. As you work on SEO, you can also run digital ads.
3. Reaches Customers on Mobile
According to Statista, 52% of worldwide website traffic comes from mobile phones!
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is a necessity.
Given the amount of time marketing takes, it is easy to forget about ensuring your site works on mobile. But, if you have an SEO strategy, don’t leave out SEO for mobile.
Your site must be optimized for mobile because Google takes a mobile-first approach to its ranking factors. That means how well your site performs on mobile plays a big part in your rankings.
4. Builds Trust
There are a plethora of options that customers can choose from in every industry and niche. To grow your business, you must distinguish yourself by appearing credible and trustworthy.
The modern consumer is quite informed. They understand the intentions behind promotional content because they see so much of it. Consumers tend to trust the first few search engine results more than an Instagram ad.
Another ranking factor in the world of SEO is backlinks. This revolves around the number of websites that link back to your platform. The more backlinks a business has, the higher the rank because backlinks act as a vote of confidence. From Google’s perspective, the more quality backlinks, the more credible the site.
Google, and other search engines, ranking algorithms value websites that offer a meaningful experience to their users. If a business succeeds in satisfying the search engines, it means they have perfected its user experience. And good user experience means more traffic, conversions, and happy customers.
Remember, SEO isn’t just about rankings. It’s about showing search engines the value of your site and improving your user experience. Good SEO leads to conversions.
SEO is Worth It
SEO helps businesses grow in more ways than you might think. Make sure to create a solid strategy that incorporates all facets of search engine optimization. If you are a small business and don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising, focus on your SEO, as it will help you in the long run.
AUTHOR BIO
Mary Warner is an enthusiast blogger. Her compelling research and communication capabilities exchange offerings that have value for the reader. Her passion for writing has been an ever-evolving affair. She loves to share her views related to the latest trends in marketing, technology, eCommerce, and the like.
Ready to start working on your SEO? Reach out to Colibri Digital Marketing for a 30-minute complimentary digital strategy session! Click the button below to talk more about the benefits of SEO, and get started!