You’ve heard about SEO, you realize it seems important, but you’re still not quite sure what it is or what it does.
So you’re wondering: “What is SEO exactly? What can it do for my company?”
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, SEO aims at getting your website more traffic, and of better quality, by making it rank higher on Google searches.
There are numerous benefits to using SEO for your business. Read this article to learn about 7 major reasons why your business needs it.
Table of Contents
1. Organic Search Is the Best Way to Get Traffic
What SEO does is increase traffic to your website through organic search results. This phrase simply means that your site appears in the search results of Google without having to pay for advertisements.
Organic search is essential to the performance of a company’s website. Basically, if customers can’t find your website, they will buy from a competitor that ranks higher on Google.
Google is the biggest search engine by a huge margin. In fact, over 90% of search queries are made through Google. Google is also the most visited website in the world and the most popular email provider.
You just can’t afford to ignore Google’s search algorithm.
2. Give Your Business More Credibility
The basics of SEO are to give your business a strong basis with a steady flow of users that want what you offer.
Google rewards well-made websites that provide a great user experience. On the other hand, sketchy websites that try to deceive people will rank lower.
When a website fulfills a user’s request and catches his or her attention, its credibility rises. The more people use and trust this website, the more Google will favor it. As a result, your brand’s reputation increases.
There are a few additional elements that help Google determine if a website is reliable, including the quality of the backlinks, machine-learning signals, and optimization of its content.
Establishing that reliability with Google is paramount, and the number one thing you can do for your business online. However, that trust is built over time with patience and effort.
3. Increase Engagement With Local SEO
With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile traffic, local search has become part of almost everyone’s daily life. Local SEO can help your business thrive by getting more people to find it.
Local SEO seeks to optimize your website to relate to a specific location so that potential customers in your area can find you easily.
Local optimization is focused on towns, cities, regions, and sometimes even states, to allow you to advertise your brand to the relevant segment of the population.
SEO experts customize your website’s content to include backlinks, local citations, and local listings that will put you on the map when it comes to your business sector and location.
An important aspect of SEO 101 is placing a strong emphasis on user reviews, especially on Google, but also on popular review sites such as Yelp and Home Advisor.
4. Learn SEO to Impact the Buying Cycle Positively
As a customer, it’s natural to do your research, as the magic of the internet allows you to look for the best deals you can get.
Thankfully, it works both ways. SEO is great for relaying any promotional offer, special deal, and new product. When done right, SEO has an excellent impact on the buying cycle.
SEO helps keep your company on its toes, ensuring that it always stays relevant, dynamic, and innovative.
5. Improve User Experience
Every company wants to rank high on Google for maximum visibility. One of the most important parameters to consider is the experience you provide your users with.
Google is now capable of interpreting positive or negative user experiences on a website. A positive user experience has become an essential element in a website’s success.
What’s a positive user experience exactly?
It’s simple. Have you ever typed a search in Google, found a promising looking website, only to realize it didn’t have the answer you were looking for? Consequently, you immediately left the website.
If many people make the same search you did, end up on the same website, and leave it very quickly, Google will realize this website isn’t satisfactory when it comes to these specific search terms, and downgrade its search ranking.
Conversely, if a website is well-made, provides the answers you’re looking for, and even interests you to click on more of its pages, it is a successful website.
When you learn SEO, it provides you with incentives to be as clear and relevant as possible to your target audience. You give people what they want, which makes your business thrive in return.
6. SEO Keeps Evolving
It isn’t enough to learn SEO once as it is ever-evolving. Even if you implement SEO tactics to your company’s online presence, you have to maintain and reevaluate it over time, otherwise, your business will eventually hit a threshold.
The search world evolves according to Google’s algorithms and requires to keep up-to-date with its trends in order to stay ahead of the competition.
SEO has become a discipline in its own right that businesses can’t afford to ignore. Being proactive and monitoring any major algorithm change is always going to benefit your company.
7. Improve Your Social Media Presence
A site with high Google rankings will also benefit when it comes to social media engagement.
It works both ways:
- SEO increases your social media visibility.
- Being popular on social media is good for SEO purposes.
Basically, you’re a lot more likely to receive likes/tweets/shares if your page is found in the first results of Google search results.
What Is SEO? the Present and the Future
So, what is SEO? Hopefully, you understand the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization better.
SEO is meant to increase your ranking on Google by optimizing your website following certain rules. These rules will help you create content that your customers appreciate.
Not only will SEO increase your online presence globally, it will also expand your customer database locally and help you generate more sales.
Consult our Internet section for more tips on how to improve your internet presence.
