Why SEO is important for every business
When planning to make a purchase, do you research a product or service before you spend your money? Do you try to find product reviews or customer feedback to help you make an informed decision?
That’s exactly what most internet users do - they Google a product or service to find more information before they make a purchase.
This is a chance for businesses/websites to shine and rank high in Google search rankings by offering a clear, informative answer to the users’ queries. And this is why search engine optimization (SEO) is not only important but essential for every business.
There has been a lot of talk about SEO and extensive studies and articles are written on the subject. However, in this post, we outline exactly why this marketing tactic is relevant for businesses of all sizes and all industries.
Organic Rankings
The primary benefit of SEO is helping businesses increase their visibility on Google and rank higher in search results. Organic ranking is invaluable because it has nothing to do with paid ads. You ranked high because your website shows up as a relevant source related to the search term.
While it isn’t easy nor fast to appear on the first page of Google search results, the method does provide long-term results.
A well-designed website that is properly optimized with quality content and keywords is more likely to appear in the search results when a user types a specific search term. This ensures your website will be visible to a much bigger pool of prospective customers.
Of course, boosting visibility is not reserved for Google only as other search engines such as Bing are significant to brands as well. However, given that Google owns the largest portion of the search market, it’s only logical that boosting those rankings is the primary goal.
Establishing Authority
SEO helps businesses become an authority in their industry.
How so?
Google and other search engines analyze a page, primarily:
- Its content as well as its relevance to the search term (it decided whether a page addresses a problem/topic and provides useful information or not)
- Links (it evaluates the quality of the links included on a page).
Again, quality content prevails here. Short, clumsy articles and guides with shady or broken links won’t make it to the top search results because Google won’t recognize them as relevant to the search term. Only genuine, useful content and carefully optimized pages will rank well.
Once you become an authority in your industry, maintaining that position is easier but only if you never seize investing in SEO.
Google keeps refining its algorithms and methods for rankings pages in search results which is why SEO keeps evolving too. Following the trends is crucial here so as to maintain your position in search engine rankings.
SEO is Fair
As mentioned above, SEO brings organic traffic and ensures that quality is recognized. This makes SEO fair and this means that all businesses, regardless of their size, can compete for their spot on the search engine results page or SERP.
Naturally, big brands have much bigger budgets to allocate to paid advertising etc., but when it comes to organic traffic, SEO is not exclusive to big businesses.
Startups, small and medium-sized businesses can all compete for their share of the market by allocating time and effort to search engine optimization.
The results are not obtained overnight and regardless of the net income of a company or its marketing budget, it is properly employed SEO practices and meaningful content that prevail.
Let's take SEO for travel websites as an example. A local travel agency or a travel blog has equal chances of competing for that page one ranking as does a large booking website or an airline company provided they adhere to the best SEO practices.
This includes building a clear, responsive website, performing keyword research, and publishing relevant, engaging content regularly among other things.
SEO is Cost-Effective
Another major benefit of SEO is that it is accessible to everyone. Just as it is fair in providing all businesses with an opportunity to compete for a piece of the market, it is also quite affordable in comparison to some other marketing methods.
Of course, it does require some investments but given that it provides long-term results and doesn’t require a huge budget, it certainly more than pays off in the long run.
It Improves Customer Experience
Lastly, SEO is important, better yet, crucial for improving customer service. As a result, improved customer experience leads to more conversions and higher profit overall.
Engaging, detailed articles won’t immediately bring conversions but they do help visitors find the information they’re looking for.
Internal and external authority links within your content help them find answers to their questions, provided they’re high-quality and credible. This makes your content and your services more accessible.
SEO helps you discover what your visitors and potential customers need and might be interested in reading so that you can deliver quality content that addresses those questions.
Of course, loading speed is another vital factor in improving customer experience as customers tend to abandon websites that load slowly.
SEO helps you pinpoint these issues and address them to build an optimized website and in turn, boost customer experience.
It’s Measurable
An SEO strategy isn’t something obscure you can’t measure and track results. On the contrary. You will know exactly how well you’re doing at any given time and whether your effort is paying off.
There are metrics that allow you to exactly measure the success of your search engine optimization efforts.
While you can measure your SEO performance based on several metrics such as SERP visibility, load speed, bounce rate, keyword ranking, or conversion rate, it is best if you define the most important metrics for your business and start tracking those.
There are various tools available to help you track organic traffic to your website as well as click-through rate, time users spent on your page, and any other metric you wish to track.
These tools will help you track your performance as well as define the areas where further improvement is needed.
