These are great questions to ask if you have a business website and are trying to figure out the best marketing plan for building revenue. The benefits of SEO include:
- Driving more qualified traffic to your website
- Because the traffic is qualified, driving more sales leads or online orders
- Building a better website
- Greater brand awareness
- Greater brand credibility
One of the biggest advantages of SEO lies in the phrase “qualified traffic.” SEO (which stands for search engine optimization, by the way) makes your website content appear high in Google’s organic rankings when people are searching for the things you sell. Timing is everything, and in the world of marketing, SEO offers the best timing of bringing people to your business when they are in some stage in the buying process — that is, SEO visitors to your website are researching an order, comparative shopping or ready to sign on the dotted line.
It’s really this superb timing that explains why you need SEO, or at least find a very strong argument to rule it out!
Among SEO purposes, it’s very important to keep in mind that driving leads or revenue stand at the top. It’s easy for companies to get sidetracked by focusing on metrics for rankings and site traffic. Some SEO professionals even get overly absorbed in those two issues. It’s great to get the number one spot on Google’s organic results. It’s great for your website to get thousands of new search engine visitors. But if the ranking and visitors don’t become customers, where is your return on investment? Nowhere!
Why is search engine optimization important? Because it’s one of the best ways to build your lead pipeline or e-commerce site revenue.
The Benefits of SEO for a Website
What does SEO do, exactly? SEO campaigns are a mixture of activities done on and off your website.
On-site, SEO campaigns do technical things such as making sure Google crawlers (Googlebots) can understand your site’s content and rank it properly, and on-page things such as add keywords (words people use in their Google searches) to your important product website pages.
Off-site, SEO campaigns focus mainly on link building — getting high-value websites and blogs to link to your website. Link building is important because Google views inbound links as a major indicator of the credibility, reliability and overall quality of your business.
There are hundreds of activities that comprise an SEO campaign, from big things such as doing keyword research to find the best strategic keywords to focus on, to very small but very important things such as making sure every Title tag of your website is unique and relevant.
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it hurts the quality of your website. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of the major benefits of SEO is the way it forces you to improve your website, to make it deliver a better user experience.
To give you an idea of how this works, here are some of the SEO goals your agency will work on in a campaign:
- Making your website pages load as quickly as possible
- Making your website as mobile-friendly as possible
- Making sure your website’s navigation is intuitive and simple
- Making internal website links point mainly to your important product/service pages
- Making your pages with the highest likelihood of conversion as prominent as possible in Google search, and as well-written and persuasive as possible
- Tracking sales leads from your website and online orders to determine their marketing sources
- Evaluating website data to continually improve pages that are not getting search engine traffic or that are not converting
This short list demonstrates the benefits of SEO for a website, but there are many more tasks that go into or potentially can go into a website. All of them add value.
The reason SEO and website improvements go hand in hand is simple: Google wants to give its search engine users the best possible results. The best results are high-quality pages of content offered by reputable companies on websites that are easy to use.
You know the frustration of visiting a website where you can’t find what you need, where the navigation takes you in circles, where you can’t understand the product or service, where you have to pinch and squeeze your mobile phone’s screen to make out what is on the page. Google does not want to expose its search engine users to that sort of user experience, so Googlebots crawl your site in large part to check out how user-friendly it is.
SEO Benefits for Small Business
Very large companies invest heavily in SEO, with monthly budgets that may reach six figures. Midsize and even some small companies enjoy healthy ROI with an SEO investment of $5,000 to $10,000 per month.
Nevertheless, a small business with a more modest budget can also enjoy the benefits of SEO. For starters, a small business should make sure its website is SEO-friendly, that nothing technical is getting in the way of Google’s ability to crawl the site and index its content. There are online diagnostic tools that can identify potential issues, giving you a to-do list of things to implement or repair on your site.
It’s also extremely helpful to have an SEO-savvy web developer. This way, any time you add a new website page, update an existing one, add functionality to the site or review technical site performance, work will be done with SEO in mind.
In terms of an SEO campaign itself, small businesses can start small, optimizing a handful of keywords rather than hundreds or thousands. This limited keyword focus reduces the scope of the campaign, and thus its cost. If you start seeing results, you can expand the campaign’s scope to hit other keywords or put more work into optimizing the keywords with which you started.
To discuss why SEO could help your business, contact us now or call 855-883-0011.