When it comes to digital marketing, how you use SEO can be one of your worst enemies or one of your greatest allies. SEO is an extremely powerful and versatile tool for your advertising tool box. But if you let it lag or count on a one and done approach it will not do the work you want it to do for you. Perhaps in a later blog we can explore the Seven Deadly Sins of SEO but for now we want to explore its virtues and why it makes sense for your business if you hope to reach your online business’s Promised Land, Nirvana, the Good Place!
SEO has tremendous potential to help your business grow and succeed online. However, unless you are an early adapter it can be hard to understand how SEO can help grow your overall business. So, it can be easy to overlook it in your marketing strategy. Don’t miss out on the wide array of virtuous benefits a solid SEO Strategy can have for your business’s growth.
1. SEO brings in new customers who are learning about your service or product.
SEO is all about improving your search engine rankings in the results pages on Google or other search engines. The higher your rankings the more visits to your site and the more conversions to customers/clients. Most online searchers are attempting to learn more about products and services they need and what kind of options are available to them..
This is called the discovery phase and it’s the ideal time to present your business to them. Perhaps they are looking for exactly what you can provide. However, if you have a low ranking, it will be difficult for these interested people to find you. In fact, they won’t. They will be presented with lots of competitors websites and choose one of them before they ever find your business.
This is how SEO works, it is a ranking system that follows the rules of Google or the other search engines so that even if your business is a perfect match for what a customer is searching for online, if your business is not using SEO you will be buried behind a list of other businesses who do the same thing or sell the same product but who are using SEO.
2. SEO Increases Targeted Website Traffic
Getting more people to your website is good for business. It is not the end result you want but is certainly a means to that end. More opportunities for business usually raise your possibility for getting more conversions and greater subsequent sales.
But when SEO is done right, it’s greater virtue is that it will attract more specifically targeted traffic to your site.
It does this by using targeting terms with the most common search words behind them. When you follow the rules of the SEO road, search engines will funnel searches that use the very terms they have helped you target. And the SEO funnel will lead them right to your services or products. All of this leads us to the next SEO virtue.
3. SEO increases conversion rates
When your site gets more visitors and those visitors are chosen more carefully through targeted search words, and they are led to the most relevant landing pages for their search, the outcome is very likely going to lead to higher conversion rates. Not only with the number of visitors increase but so will the number of inquiries and/or sales! SEO is so effective because it leads people who are genuinely interested in your products and services right to your relevant landing pages!
4. SEO effectively raises brand awareness for your business
Even if someone searching for your service or product doesn’t go directly to your website, they will more than likely read your business name, if it ranks high enough, each time they search. Therefore, over time all those people will become aware of your brand, familiar with your name. Eventually, if they need more of what they are looking for they will go to your website with a greater sense of trust and overall understanding of what they want. This heightened brand awareness has long term benefits for your business that may not show up right away.
5. SEO offers Cost-effective marketing
You will probably be surprised to discover that SEO can be a highly cost-effective form of digital marketing where you can even find an advantage over your bigger competitors.
Larger businesses which have bigger budgets will outspend you on pay-per-click advertising, as well as other forms of advertising and marketing. But the good news for smaller and medium sized businesses is that a well-thought-out SEO strategy can help you contend with the big boys and girls for online business.
SEO gives you a lot of bang for your buck. In fact it can produce a very high Return On Investment (ROI) because when you get funnelled the right traffic your ceiling can become very high. Besides, as your website climbs in SEO ranking there becomes less of a need to spend money on marketing campaigns in other areas. It will still be vital that you diligently maintain your SEO, but you won’t be paying as much for advertising elsewhere.
6. SEO Improves your website usability
How users experience your website is a key element in driving conversions, but their experience also improves or diminishes the power of SEO.
The bottom line is that the use of best SEO practices will lead to an improved experience for your customer when she or he visits your website. Google is obsessive about giving their users the best experience possible. So that’s what drives how Google ranks the multitude of sites available. User activity gives Google the information it wants to help them guide future users to the best sites for what they are searching for.
Google is happy when users find what they want from their searches and unhappy when they don’t. This means that when you hone in on improving your SEO, you will also be benefiting by improving over time the usability of your site. And when you improve the usability of your site, then the search engine rankings for your site will improve and everyone is happy!
7. SEO results have staying power
When you use pay-per-click or online ads or even off-line ads the results from them will only last for as long as you keep paying to run those ads.
With SEO the formula can be a little more long lasting. As long as you maintain your SEO efforts for an extended time so that you see your business start ranking, your website will stay up there for quite awhile with just some regular maintenance. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, especially for the long term. But by maintaining a ranking above your competitors on significant keywords, your site should enjoy a good ride of steady traffic, growing brand awareness and conversions and sales.
Give your full service marketing agency a call or website visit today to find out more about how SEO can help drive traffic to your business website. zo agency offers expert advice and unparalleled service for all your marketing needs!
