Why is search engine optimization important to a business?
SEO is often an underutilized digital marketing tactic. With searches on Google hitting approximately 63K search queries per second1, perhaps businesses should consider optimizing their website for search a top priority. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of making quality changes to your website to improve its chances of showing up in search results. More appearances in search results increases traffic to your website and visibility for your brand. This is what makes SEO so important to a business.
Without SEO, your website is in the no man’s land of the web. If you’ve checked the traffic on your website recently and saw a tumbleweed roll across the screen, we’re talking to you! Without search engine optimization, your website’s traffic suffers, leading to a missed opportunity to engage with prospective clients.
What are the benefits of search engine optimization?
There are so many benefits to using search engine optimization. We’ll touch on three that we believe have served our clients the most, especially if they’ve chosen to blog.
1. Longevity
A well-crafted piece of content on your website can bring in new traffic for years to come. Well-optimized content is evergreen, continuously relevant to interested readers. Compared to other marketing tactics like radio spots and social media posts where engagement often spikes and then fizzles out, SEO keeps your content in front of your target audience at the exact moment they are in the market for your services.
2. Visibility
A website with optimized content can increase your brand exposure by reaching audiences who are in the market for your services, but may not know your brand even exists. It’s Sunday night, you’re just about to hit the hay to rest up for your big meeting Monday morning, and a pipe in your bathroom bursts! What do you Google? More than likely, you’d search “plumber near me” or “how to fix a burst pipe in the wall” over a specific company name. Optimizing your site to show up for these unbranded search queries that are relevant to your industry gets more eyeballs on you and your services.
3. Targetability
SEO really helps you get into the nitty gritty details about what you do and how you do it, ultimately helping you really focus on and engage with potential clients who are poised to work with you. Want to be an accountability coach for creatives? We can target that. Want to offer executive leadership coaching to family owned businesses? We can target that. Think of SEO the same way you must think about niching down in your business. You may think you want to cast your net wide and get all the fish, but really you want to fish who are ready to connect with you. We can find and engage with those people with SEO.
What kinds of companies need SEO?
With so many benefits to SEO, you may be wondering if it’s a sound tactic for everyone. We believe all businesses need SEO. Most companies understand that they need a website, but many don’t know that their website provides little to no value without search engine optimization. Utilizing SEO best practices helps build awareness about the company brand, expose the brand to potential clients/customers, and increase traffic to the website to get more leads.
If your business falls under one of these categories, you should strongly consider search engine optimization:
1. Service-Based Businesses
If you’re providing a service, having content on your site about that service and topics related to that service is key. Search engine optimization can help you first, determine what those topics should be and then make sure the content you write about those topics can be found. SEO will help establish you and your business as a thought-leader and expert in your industry, giving you a competitive advantage amongst the audience looking for your services.
2. E-Commerce Businesses
Let’s be honest here. We know you’ve shopped online and we know that you know the online shopping game is fierce. Search for “denim shorts” online if you want to. You better be ready to sift through a sea of results. If you are an e-commerce business that is not optimizing your website, you won’t even have a chance to appear for unbranded product searches. SEO will help make sure your site architecture is set up well to categorize your products, that your product names use keywords that customers are searching and that you’re setup for local SEO if you also have a brick and mortar location.
3. Local Businesses
If you are a business that serves the community around you, a local SEO strategy is a necessity. The past years have a seen a steady increase in searches for local businesses “near me”2. There are also stats that show once a person searches for a local business online, they visit the physical business location or make a purchase online soon after. Local searches are often highly motivated consumers. SEO for a local business makes sure you can compete when searches are often looking for an immediate solution. Making sure you have NAP (Name Address Phone Number) consistency across the web, adding locality clues to your content and utilizing tools like Google My Business which provides a free business listing to show up in Google maps for local searches are invaluable SEO tactics for local businesses.
Search Engine Optimization can help any business who is interested in connecting with their target audience at various points along their customer decision journey. We like the way a Think With Google3 article said it. SEO can help you “find the sweet spot where your customer’s goals and your own align.” Don’t miss out on the benefits of including SEO in your digital marketing arsenal.
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