Reasons Why Your Website Would Benefit From Search Engine Optimization

Our consumers today strongly rely on search engines to assist them in finding everything from business to business software to restaurant recommendations.

What this means is that regardless of what your business has to offer, the audiences you are targeting are most likely searching for products and services like your own on search engines like Google. And if your goal is to attract these consumers to your website, then you will definitely need search engine optimisation.

But if you have done your research about what your digital marketing options are then you’ve probably heard that before.

Once you have made peace with this, though, your next question is probably going to be, how do I do search engine optimisation?

Below we will explain what exactly it is that makes SEO so important, as well as share some search engine optimisation tools and techniques that you can make use of to increase your online visibility.

Introducing you to SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a digital marketing strategy for improving your website’s rankings in the search engine’s results.

SEO involves identifying certain keywords and phrases your target audience used when they are searching for products and services like yours, then you work towards ranking better for those searches.

Reasons Why Your Website Would Benefit From Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a very important part of any effective marketing strategy.

But for us to fully illustrate its importance, we will need to go over some of the reasons you should optimise your website.

It can help you build your brand

Often, branding is considered a more traditional marketing strategy, while search engine optimization falls into the digital category, these two often have very similar steps.

Your brand is built will require considering both what you or your business provides and what others have to say about it.

The factors are also quite similar when it comes to the steps involved in optimizing a website. You will need to have content created that falls in line with your audience’s interests and needs and then find ways to earn links to your content via other websites.

Provided you keep this relationship in mind when developing your SEO strategy, you can then choose keywords and create good content that is in line with the image you would like your brand to have.

This way, your online presence will reflect your ideal branding and assist in establishing it with your target audience.

A website that has been optimized will earn more traffic

On the surface, the goal of doing search engine optimization is for your website to gain a higher ranking on search results.

But apart from that, the reason we want those higher rankings is to attract more traffic and ideally, to convert those who visit the website into leads and customers. And yes, it does work.

Below is an example of an organic traffic report from a case study:

As the months go by you can see that the website’s traffic increased from nothing to 10- 000 visitors, and this was entirely from SEO.

SEO is definitely the best option if your goal is to bring more visitors to your website.

You do not have to pay for ad space with SEO

The fact that you do not have to pay for ad space when it comes to SEO is one of the biggest advantages.

Think about how the more traditional ad campaigns operate.

You decide on the location where your brand needs to appear, whether that is on a particular radio station, TV channel or in the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

You then need to pay the media company for the placement of your ad. You may pay for your ad to run within a certain number of issues or for a certain amount of time, and as soon as your time is up, your ad will stop appearing and so will your results.

Now, take into consideration, the many different pages that appear in search engine results.

Google Ads appear in your search results and have a small “Ad” tag next to them.

Much like your more traditional ad campaigns, getting and keeping one of those spots will have ongoing costs involved.

And like many who work with Google Ads know, you will only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. This definitely gives Google Ads an edge over traditional ad campaign methods.

Nevertheless, each visitor will involve a cost, and the minute your Google Ads campaign is paused or you run out of budget, your ad will stop showing.

But those websites that organically appear below or above the Goggle Ads, are not paying a cent to be there.

Granted, they most probably invested their time and money into creating the website and pages that are ranking on the search engine, they are on page one because Google’s algorithm thinks they provide a great value to the users. And because of this, they are gaining more and more traffic and not having to pay for it.

SEO allows your target audience to find your website

SEO gives you the ability to appear in front of your target audience as they are actively searching for information.

This is a great opportunity, based on how common it is for consumers to make use of search engines to find helpful information about products and services.

In fact, more or less, 62% of consumers will make use of search engines before any other platform if they are looking to learn more about a new business, product or service.

So basically, if you would like your business to be part of a user’s online research process, you will need to ensure that it shows up in the search results for keywords that relate to the products and services that you have to offer.

In addition, according to the same survey, there are more or less 48% of consumers who prefer to visit a company’s official website in order to learn more about them.

By ensuring that your company has s strong online presence, you will not only be bettering your chances at reaching your marketing goals but you will also be enabling your target audience to research and purchase in a way that works for them.

SEO boosts your authority and credibility

For many businesses, the sales process has drastically changed because of the internet.

This is because today, many consumers have access to many different resources, which allow them to learn about their options even before speaking to a sales representative.

SEO allows you to become part of this process. 

This is especially true when your SEO efforts are combined with content marketing. When you have valuable and informative content, you have an opportunity to build your company’s credibility and trust with potential customers.

Below is some more information and a general overview of how this works:

First, a person will come across your website, by searching for information that is relevant to what your business has to offer and seeing one of your resources pop up in the search results.

Then, after reading that resource, if that is what they are interested in, they may share it with family and friends and often subscribe to your email list.

Now the process starts to take a bit longer.

The user may decide to return to your website more than once and read your email content for a couple of months without doing anything about it.

This can become a bit frustrating if you are used to the more traditional sales process.

But with each time they read through some of your content, you are still establishing your brand as an authority and credible source of information.

Then, once they are ready to purchase something or sit down with a salesperson, they should know exactly which company to turn to and they should be completely comfortable doing do after reading all of the information previously provided at no cost.

SEO can assist in keeping you ahead of your competitors

When your website is being optimised, you are not just improving where your website is ranking, but also having it rank above your competitors.

Keep in mind that the first result on the search results page will get on average 20.5% of the clicks. The second result will get 13.32%, and the third result will get 13.14%.

This means that as your website moves higher up the search results, you will be earning a bigger percentage of the available clicks for your target keywords and therefore, your competitors will be earning less of them.

SEO can improve user experience

Google’s goal is to give its users the best possible results.

As a result, many of Google’s algorithm updates focus on ensuring that the users are being directed to websites that not only offer the most relevant content, but also good user experience.

That is why technical factors like usability, mobile-friendliness and site speed play a much bigger role than before. 

While this does mean that the optimization of your website may require some assistance from professionals, it also means that your business will continuously be improving the user experience that your website provides.

When it comes to the impact that user experience has on your conversions, this could also have a big impact on your company’s sales and revenue in the long term.

SEO is easily measured

Finally, one of the very best advantages of SEO is that you are able to measure almost every aspect of your results.

Unlike the more traditional methods, which can very often rely on looking for correlations between the ad campaign and the sales, it is quite simple to see all of the return you are getting from SEO.

There are many different tools like Google Analytics, which allows you to monitor your referral sources, traffic, conversions and many other metrics that are important to your business.

By doing it this way, you are able to accurately evaluate what is working for you and what is not. You can also be confident that you are allocating your marketing budget to certain strategies which have the best and biggest impact on your most important marketing goals.

How do you do SEO?

The very basic premise of SEO is to improve your rankings in the search results.

However, Google continuously updates its algorithm, and the same steps that are required to achieve your goals, do change over time.

So even though the general idea stays the same, there are certain things that you will want to consider as you optimize your website.

Focusing on the user

It is almost impossible to predict Google’s algorithm updates. 

Google is very secretive when it comes to the changes in the algorithm, often, even after the changes have happened, which is why it is so difficult to keep up with them.

Still, each of these updates all has one thing in common, they are all designed to assist the search engine in providing the very best possible results for the searchers.

So as you are making improvements on your website, keep in mind that your focus needs to stay on the user.

Pick topics that are most relevant to their needs, have your content written in a way that is helpful and very straightforward and ensures that your website is simple enough to engage with and navigate.

Even though there is no way to know what Google’s next move will be, this way, you will be working with the same goals in mind and this is only going to work in your favour. 

Make use of keyword optimization

From the very beginning, search engines have been using keywords as a consideration in how pages are ranked, and today they are still just as important.

Ensure that your website is optimized for the mobile-first index

Over the past couple of years, one of the biggest changes in how users browse the internet is the device they choose to access online content.

Back in the day, the only way you could access a search engine was on a desktop computer.

Nowadays, the number of users who browse on tablets, smartphones and other devices continues to grow. In fact, in 2016, mobile internet usage surpassed desktop internet usage for the very first time.

This explains why Google would take the necessary steps to ensure that their results prioritized those pages that were accessible on mobile devices.

The first one of these steps were taken in April 2015, they started boosting mobile-friendly pages in the search results.

Then in 2016 Google decided to take it a step further and they announced that it would be switching over to a mobile-first index.

Google has always ranked and indexed pages based on how they appeared on the desktop. This made sense at the time as these users were making up the majority of their audience.

At Right Click Media International, we specialise in a wide range of digital marketing services including SEO. For more information about our SEO packages visit our website on www.rightclickmediaint.com.