Why is SEO important for businesses?
It’s a question that likely comes up often, as small businesses need to compete for visibility, both on a local scale and a global one, and SEO is often touted as the solution.
If you’re looking to boost brand awareness, get your product or service in front of the right people, and grow your business, SEO (search engine optimisation) is crucial, whether you go into the trenches to learn how to do it yourself, or you hire an expert.
SEO is important for a lot of reasons, and we’re going to break some of them down for you today.
1. It provides an excellent return on your investment
It’s important to remember that, when done right, SEO always provides an excellent return on your investment.
Firstly, if you decide to study SEO and carry it out, it can actually cost you nothing but time. While that may be a significant amount of time, if you approach it correctly everything you do will contribute towards growing your business.
Of course, not everybody has the SEO knowledge or time to actually do that. And even of those who do, many may choose to outsource their SEO to an agency anyway, preferring to focus all of their time on doing what they do best and growing their business.
But even hiring an SEO agency, if done properly, provides an excellent return on your investment. Of course, you need to be safe in the knowledge that you’ve gone for a respectable agency that knows what they’re doing, and one who’s pricing is within a reasonable, manageable budget.
But there are SEO agencies out there such as omniSEO, who offer both a free action plan to explain to you exactly what your site needs, and a money back guarantee if they don’t do what they say they will do, meaning the risk involved in hiring them is quite literally zero.
Yes, SEO is a crowded space nowadays, and there are agencies and freelancers out there with poor skills or absurd prices. But it only takes a little research to avoid them, and by sticking to SEO service providers whop are reputable and honest, OR by carry out SEO yourself and continuing to improve your knowledge, it isn’t difficult for long term growth to be guaranteed.
2. It supports your content marketing efforts
Creating great quality content, and using SEO best practices, is something that comes together like bread and butter.
Creating amazing content isn’t gonna achieve anything if nobody sees it. But optimising each piece of content correctly will mean your videos, images, and blog posts rank well separately from your service pages or product pages, and bring in regular, relevant traffic in the long term.
Not only does this benefit the content itself, but with proper use of CTAs (calls to action), they can all point pre-sold traffic to your site.
Google rewards you for this with higher rankings too, making a compounding benefit that continues to improve your business over time.
3. It boosts your authority and credibility
If your site is ranked highly in Google in relevant search terms, this means Google thinks you are trustworthy, high quality and relevant enough to be offered to people looking for those keywords.
This respect is passed on to those who see you coming up high in the search results, as they’re not only more likely to click on your site and potentially become customers, but they are also more likely to remember you and use you in the future, or recommend your business to others.
Being so highly regarded also makes it more likely that other businesses will reach out to you to collaborate or use your services, since they are more likely to know how much time and effort is involved in an effective SEO campaign.
4) It benefits and boosts your paid ad campaigns
Paid ad campaigns work incredibly alongside effective SEO, and for those with the capital to invest in both, should be seen as two sides of the same strategy.
Having your pages rank organically at the top of the search results, while your paid ads also display above that, boosts your brands credibility and creates a feeling of clearly standing out above the crowd.
You can also use PPC to boost your SEO results, for example paying for extra traffic to a page that is already organically ranked well, especially if the keywords are low cost per click.
5) It increases awareness of your brand
Most marketing campaigns focus on a very specific target audience. And while SEO is no different, different stages of your conversion funnel provide opportunities to attract anyone with the correct intent, even if those audiences are slightly different.
This requires excellent keyword research and prioritising those keywords that are closest to the correct intent and relevance, but if done correctly, the people most likely to be interested in your offerings will be consistently made aware of them, at the exact time they’re looking for that sort of thing.
6) It increases your competitiveness within your industry or niche
There is a high chance your competitors are investing in SEO, especially the more significant ones. You therefore cannot really compete with them without an effective SEO strategy to build your own ranks and traffic in a similar, ideally more effective, way.
It’s important to remember that 90% of people who search in Google end up choosing to click on something on page 1, so if you’re not there, you might as well not exist.
Of course, even if your competitors aren’t investing in SEO, there is nothing to say they won’t get their act together and start one day. This means you should be doing it anyway, with a target of getting as far ahead as possible.
7) Local SEO is a game changer
If you’re a business that primarily looks for clients or customers in the nearby area or region, such as plumbers, builders merchants or, ironically local SEO agencies, local SEO may well be the most important thing you ever do. It ensures that local potential buyers who are currently ready to buy, are pointed towards your business rather than a competitor, or even a non local business.
The first step is setting up a Google My Business account, listing the correct contact details, and beginning to accrue positive reviews. After this you can optimise specific pages for local searches and gain local citations to boost your authority. OmniSEO are experts in local SEO and can do this quickly and effectively in any area or industry. Consider getting in touch if you need help with this, and remember the money back guarantee makes this risk free.
8) It improves the user experience
SEO, when done correctly, encourages you to provide a sensible site structure, fast loading pages, an easy to understand user experience, and even to regularly tackle any technical issues that may arise.
By doing this and staying on top of it, you aren’t just improving your site for Google, you’re improving the experience of everyone that visits it too.
9) Results are quantifiable and undebatable
Sometimes, marketing results can be wishy washy. If you hire a copywriter to redesign a billboard, for example, you may not notice any difference to your business. You can even completely launch a new website and experience little to no benefit, if it is done with a poor web designer or without an effective strategy driving it.
Not the case with SEO. It’s easy to see how many people visit your site each day, week, month or year. It’s easy to see which pages and keywords they come from. It’s just as easy to see how many of those people turned into paying customers. This means that it won’t take much time for you to figure out if your SEO strategy is effective or not, and how much of a return on investment you’re getting.
This allows you to tweak further. If you’re not getting the return you expected, the strategy likely needs to be revisited. If you are consistently getting a significant return, then you will likely feel the confidence to step things up and invest even more. Either way, the full picture is easily available and the power is in your hands.
As you can see, SEO has countless benefits for businesses and really should be a priority for any business looking to grow or gain new customers.
At omniSEO, we are the leading UK and Cardiff SEO agency and provide local, national and global results for companies all over.
To learn more, go to About us.