Search engines help millions of users who come searching for answers to their queries. If you have a website, online business or store, SEO can get you the targeted customers, by driving free relevant traffic from the search engines directly to your website or blog.
SEO Overview
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process which attempts to improve your search engine rankings. In more simple words, what SEO does is, it ensures that whenever a user searches for relevant words or phrases to what your website is offering, your website shows up in the top few searches of the Search Engines Results Page (SERPs).
Now let’s see a research done by Hubspot before we go further into studying the reasons why SEO is important for every business. So, it says, more than 75% users never scroll past the first page of the Search engines results page (SERPs). By looking at this, we can clearly state that, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page on the search engines results, chances are that the majority of users won’t even know your website exists.
SEO is the backbone of every business. It serves its purpose by helping the businesses get the online visibility they need, which in turn attracts more customers to them. In today’s era, running a business is similar to competing in a marathon. Here, SEO can surely help bypass your competitors and win the race.
Let us consider that there are two businesses from the same sector, offering similar products or services to their clients at the same rates. Now, out of these two businesses, one of them has a SEO optimized website and the other doesn’t. According to you, which of the two, will draw more customers through online search and which firm do you think has more chances to grow faster?
To answer the above question, let’s take help of some statistics.
- According to InternetLiveStats, every day Google receives more than 3.9 million searches.
- A study made in 2004 by Advanced Web Rankings, was posted by theleverageway , the first five organic results by Google get 67% of clicks.
- According to databox, 70% of marketers say that SEO is more effective at driving sales than PPC.
By looking at the above statistics, I am sure that we can surely answer the above questions. Businesses who follow good SEO practices will gain benefit from it. SEO can get your business benefits like increased traffic and conversions, credibility and brand awareness.
Top 9 Reasons why SEO is important for every business
1. SEO gives you more visibility –
One of the most significant benefits of SEO is that it improves the visibility of your website by improving your rankings in the search engines. With the help of SEO you can add relevant keywords to your website’s content, so that whenever a user searches for those relevant keywords on search engines, your site is one of the top results which shows up.
Increasing the visibility of your website will eventually lead to more people looking up through the products and services you offer and thus becoming your potential customers.
According to a case study done by Pronto Marketing, clients in their business saw their keyword rankings improve by 25%, over the duration of nine months.
Image source – Pronto Marketing
2. SEO is measurable –
When it comes to proving how digital marketing is better than traditional marketing, one of the most significant advantages is that your marketing efforts can be measured in Digital Marketing. Google provides various tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console in order to measure the results of your marketing efforts.
Web analytics give you the actual report and analytics of how the site visitors behave once they are on your website. They tell you more about the visitors like their age, gender, location etc. They also tell you how they landed on your website, the most liked content on the site by the users, your total conversions and much more. All this is measurable. With this valuable information, you can plan your business strategies better and grow your business faster.
3. It drives more organic traffic –
As mentioned earlier, SEO increases your visibility in the search results which in turn increases your chances of driving more relevant users to your website. Let us see the real life implementations of SEO by businesses and it’s results.
- As published on Search engine Land, Columnist Andrew Dennis, highlights the process he used for driving traffic to a brand new website, without using any tools or hacks. Here, he discusses the methods he used at Siege Media, and how he built the site’s SEO strategy, wherein they grew from zero visitors to 100,000.
- Peep Laja, is a blogger who successfully managed to get over 40,000 visitors to his blog in the first month of it’s launch. He did this by planning and executing a tactical SEO strategy
4. It enhances User Experience –
One of the significant experiences of SEO is that it enhances user experience and helps you leave a lasting impression on your customers.
What is user experience? It is the overall experience of the user using a product like a website or a computer application with respect to how easy or pleasing it is to use. This term encompasses the overall involvement the user has with the product.
SEO connects you with users who are searching for information relevant to the products or services that you offer. If your website contains information that is relevant to what the users are looking for, it is bound to leave a positive impact on the user’s experience.
Other than this, SEO also involves other methods you can enhance the user experience of your customer such as, developing an easy-to-navigate layout, increasing the speed at which the pages in your website load and using a mobile-friendly configuration.
5. It improves your site’s engagement rate –
An enhanced user experience for your audience means that will likely be spending more time on your website. This user engagement is important because high user engagement leads to increased ROI.
If your customers are engaging with your product, it means that they are bonding with your business. This can ensure customer loyalty for your product. Since your website is easy to navigate and it contains the right information they are looking for, it is easy for users to engage with your content. This eventually leads to the user spending more time on your website and increasing the engagement rate.
6. It yields higher click through rate –
Another benefit of SEO is that more visibility and relevance in search results will lead to better click-through rates. The prominent your site is in the search results, the more click-through rates it will receive.
Let us look at an analysis done by Advanced Web Ranking. According to them, the website ranking in top positions in the search results gets a significantly higher click-through rate, on desktop as well as mobile searches.
In this analysis, they generated a CTR of 30.54% on desktop and 23.59% on mobile. They say, the click-through rate gradually drops with respect to a drop in the website’s search position. Thus they suggest that there is a correlation between higher search ranking and higher click-through rate.
Image source – Advanced web Ranking
7. It helps you drive more sales
SEO improves your performance as it helps you attract relevant customers and quality leads. This helps in driving more sales to you. Now, how does this work? Let’s study the case of Pinocchio’s Italian Eatery situated in Brighton, Colorado.
This restaurant had never worked with an SEO expert before nor was their website mobile friendly. With the help of an SEO team, they launched a mobile-friendly website that had an optimized layout in an attempt to ease user interactions. When they did this, the restaurant reported a 16.7% increase in their sales.
8. Organic results get more clicks than Pay-Per-Click
Search ads are much more significant in the search results, so it can be assumed that they will get more clicks than organic search results. While paid-advertisements have some impact on the website’s traffic, people still prefer the organic search results over the paid advertisements.
According to a research by SparkToro, most of the searches don’t even get a single click. But, among all the searches, most of the users went for the organic search results. In 2018, 66% of clicks made from mobile and laptops, went for the organic search results. Only 3% people went for the paid advertisements.
Image source – SparkToro
9. It helps you keep up with the competition
Every marketer finds SEO important so generally even your competitors are probably going to use it. According to Zazzle Media, 88% of their marketers consider SEO as a significant part of their marketing strategy.
This means that implementing a SEO strategy will help you keep up with your competitors. It may be a tough challenge to get ahead of your competitors, but SEO will make sure that you won’t be very behind in the race.
Image source – Zazzle media
Thus, we have discussed how SEO plays an important role in determining the marketing strategy of every business.
