The real reason why your business needs to consider SEO.
Why is SEO Important?
The real reason why your business needs to consider SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation is in it’s simplest form the manner of delivering free (non-paid) traffic from search engine results pages to your website.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels
Obviously it’s not truly free as it takes time, effort and skill to achieve those results and search rankings — but the ROI if you consider the number of organic clicks vs paid means it may as well be ‘free website traffic’.
In 2021, Google accounted for over 92% of the Global Search Engine Marketshare. In the USA its around 86% and in the UK its 92.75% … you can see the full stats via Global Stats Counter here.
You may look at this and think, oh Bing is next in search — but it’s not… the next Big search engine is YouTube with 2Bn searches a month! then comes Bing! (it just happens YouTube counts as social media :/ )
We know then that SEO is important because it delivers ‘free website traffic’ but why else is SEO important?
- It Builds Brand Credibility
To consumers, a site that ranks higher than its competitors (and isn’t an ad) is seen as one which is a higher-authority and higher-quality. These two attributes can help build your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness overtime. - A Competitive Advantage
Many businesses give a nod to SEO, doing only the basics (usually when a website is set up — installing plugins for example). But by putting a clear focus on SEO each month will give your business an advantage over competitors and help boost your rankings, gaining your business more traction in search and so getting you more traffic from search. - Reach A Bigger Audience
Paid Ads generally target very specific audience sets or ‘look alike’ audience which is quite tight as to not ‘waste money’. However, SEO if correctly strategized looks to attract a broad audience who may be interested in your products and services, as well as to compliment your ads. This means your audience is much broader, and comes at a lower cost. - Local Search Advantage
SEO isn’t just about selling products or writing blogs, its about ensuring businesses can rank locally and advance lead generation through this. This means you can also reduce cost through third-party citation platforms such as Yell moving forward and focus on your own website and platforms offering the best experience for the user, whilst boosting local ranking for your website and not the third-party website. - It’s More Than Just Traffic
SEO is about more than just driving ‘free traffic’ to your website, SEO is about improving the user experience (for example through improving page speed) but also about improving user engagement to get better outcomes for the business — as there is no point in getting bad traffic to the site that doesn’t convert. SEO is about a holistic view to improve search rankings, improve traffic and improve user experience.
SEO has a huge number of benefits for a business, not just improving website traffic and search rankings. It can impact on brand credibility and of course increase leads or sales — but SEO is much more than any single one of its components or outcomes — SEO is always a journey, it doesn’t happen overnight and it is an important investment.
