No matter your industry, if you have a business, it’s important to understand why SEO matters. It’s one of the most important things you can focus time and resources on, despite it requiring some patience. Whether you’re looking for construction and roofer SEO services, you’re a marketer, in tech, or in an e-Commerce business, optimizing your site for search matters.
Search engine optimization or SEO means setting up your business website and its content to show up in online search results. Many marketing tactics rely on you as a business reaching out to your targeted audience. SEO is unique because you reach people as they’re actively searching for information related to your products or services.
Search engines use algorithms to determine how to provide people with relevant information. You want your site to appear on page one whenever possible. And even better than that, in the first three search results on the first page. You need to build authority on topics related to your business. That can be done through on-site SEO.
Despite its importance, it’s something that still too few businesses strategically emphasize. The following are seven specific reasons SEO matters.
Web story: Why SEO matters more than ever
1. Organic Search Is Usually the Primary Source of Web Traffic
Organic search is a primary part of the performance of most business websites and that’s why SEO matters. It’s a key part of your buyer funnel and will get users to complete a conversion or engagement. But let’s dive into why SEO matters a bit more with these seven reasons.
Google owns a much larger segment of the search market than its competitors, so it’s where you should put most of your attention.
Google is the world’s most visited website, and YouTube is the second-largest search engine, underscoring the importance of including video as part of your SEO and content marketing strategy.
2. Building Trust and Credibility
When you are easily found in searches and provide relevant information to people looking for answers to questions they may have, it helps you cultivate trust and credibility as a business.
People will learn to go to you when they need your products or services because you’re top-of-mind for them.
You can also continue building on your online authority. For example, you’ll get more natural links to your site as you focus on SEO, improving your content rankings.
As you build your site and content, you establish your brand as an authority and a go-to in your industry.
You have to consider that consumers are very discerning and skeptical now and often completely ignore ads. SEO is organic, though, so they feel like it’s more trustworthy in many cases than paid ads.
Read next: Want to Build Customer Trust? Try Using the Magic of Reception Marketing!
3. You Can Use SEO To Learn More About Customers
Brands and businesses spend a lot of time and money researching their targeted customers to find out what they want. SEO can help you uncover consumer intent in very specific ways.
For example, when you’re doing keyword research to use as a basis for your content creation, you’re also able to learn what questions people most often have. You can learn how to be a problem-solver for your targeted customers and fill in gaps from your competitors by researching keywords.
4. Local Search Is Increasingly Important in a Mobile World
Local search isn’t a big part of their SEO strategy for certain businesses, but for many, it should be. We mentioned construction and roofing businesses above, which are great examples. Local search is much less competitive than general SEO, so you can refine your content creation and SEO strategies to appeal to those near your business.
Local search, especially with the domination of mobile traffic, is a very important part of success for small and medium-sized businesses.
Local SEO helps you optimize your digital properties for a particular location so people can find your business easily, putting you one step closer to acquiring a customer.
Optimizing for local search involves focusing on neighborhoods, cities, towns, and regions and sometimes is as broad as optimizing for a particular state.
5. It’s cheaper than paid over time
You might focus much of your digital strategy on paid advertising, which is fine, but SEO can be inexpensive or even free. If you’re doing the research and the work, it’s free, although this requires a big dedication of your time. You can also hire relatively inexpensive agencies compared to the long-term returns you will get.
You only get the benefits from that one click when you pay for ads. With SEO, your content stays on your site and compounds itself. For example, the more optimized content you create, the more links you will get back to your site. Then this is going to further improve your rankings over time, and it will keep building.
If you implement SEO well now, it will be relevant and help you for years.
SEO is very much a long-term strategy. It can have a short-term impact, but it often grows and evolves.
6. SEO is Easily Measurable
You can pretty easily begin to calculate your ROI for SEO. It’s not always as simple as doing so for paid ads, but it’s not incredibly challenging. You can see how your particular digital marketing actions are affecting your growth and performance, making changes as needed.
7. When You Have Good SEO, It Improves the User Experience
Google has refined its algorithm so that it’s serving results to users of the highest quality and will reflect their needs and interests in the best ways possible. Google can interpret a good versus a bad user experience, and you’re rewarded with higher rankings when you provide a positive experience.
This is a win-win from the business perspective because you’re pushed to optimize the user experience to rank, and both will be beneficial for your growth and success.
8. Owning the messaging
It’s kind of an SEO disaster when some unrelated Facebook page ranks for your main offering and your website doesn’t.
Sure, it might drive some awareness for you, but are they sending people to the right place? Is the messaging on point? And do you want to be affiliated with that Facebook page?
It’s way better for a business to have their own website rank for that offering.
That way you can control the messaging and the details and all the related stuff.
But how do you do that? That means the technical SEO on your website needs to be well done and the related answer-type content also needs to drive SEO performance.
Some people will say oh but we don’t need it. Things are going well. And that might be true today but how about tomorrow?
Search engine optimization and good content strategy is hardly ever about today. It’s usually about next week and how are you protect your digital reputation in the future.
