Why is SEO important for businesses: Must read!
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Abdul Wadood
In this digital era, many businesses started to utilize SEO because of the benefits it offers. They realized that SEO is essential to improve their digital presence.
However, if you’re new to the digital marketing world, you’ll probably wonder why is SEO important for businesses? Also, does your business require SEO? In this blog, I have answered your questions.
Let’s get started!
Topics to be covered in this blog:
What is SEO?
First, let’s get a quick overview of the search engine and how it works.
In short, search engines gives you the answer for the phrases you type in the search query.
Search engines do a lot of work behind the scene to show you appropriate and relevant answers. Each time you perform a search, the search engine goes through the copy of all the content that it has discovered. This stored copy is called the index.
Crawling is the technique that search engines utilize to create the index.
Next, with the help of algorithms, the search engine will rank the content from its index. The ranking of the content will depend on its relevance to your search query.
Now, speaking about SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. As the name suggests, SEO is the process of optimizing your website or content to rank high for a search query.
The following are some of the significant factors that influence SEO:
- Page loading speed
- Internal and external links
- Domain authority
- Keyword optimization
- Mobile-friendliness
- Content optimization
- URL structure
- Title tags
Here’s the diagrammatic representation of SEO from Moz.
Why is SEO important for businesses? (8 reasons)
Nowadays, digital marketing triumphs over traditional marketing in almost all factors. Simplicity, better control, higher reach, tremendous engagement, and less expensive are some of the primary advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing.
As for SEO, it’s one of the best and the most effective forms of digital marketing. So, now, let’s see the reasons why SEO is essential for your business.
1. SEO can yield long-term results (passive income)
Building SEO is a process, and it requires lots of time and effort. In general, it may take about 8 months for SEO to start working for your business.
Digital marketing strategies that depend on inorganic traffic, like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, can yield quicker results than SEO. However, they aren’t long-term solutions as you’ve to pay each time to receive traffic.
SEO can’t make you generate quick revenue; however, the income grows tremendously over time. For example, if you make $2000 from SEO in your 8th month, it may increase to $2500 in the 12th month with the same content and strategy.
Moreover, the traffic from SEO is consistent, which means once you build your website’s or content’s SEO, you’ll be generating revenue even if you don’t work on it. In other words, you’ll make money passively!
2. SEO is cost-effective
SEO is a lot more cost-effective than traditional marketing. It’s also more cost-effective than some forms of digital marketing.
In SEO, the better your skills, the better will be the results. The whole SEO strategy depends primarily on skills, which means that money isn’t involved much.
If you want to start building SEO for your business, all you need is a website. Thanks to Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, developing a website has become pretty simple and affordable.
In simple words, the Content Management System (CMS) lets you create, manage, or modify the content on the website without coding and other technical skills. So, even if you’re a complete beginner with no coding knowledge, you can develop and publish your website in about two weeks.
As for the pricing, web-hosting service providers like HostGator offer hosting solutions for less than $100 a year. (Note: The renewal costs are generally higher than the initial cost). In the first year of your hosting plan, HostGator also provides a free domain name.
Thus, with less than $100, you can implement SEO for your business. However, if you don’t have SEO knowledge, you may have to hire an agency, which can be expensive but worth it.
3. SEO drives higher quality traffic
Generally, the quality of traffic through search engine results is high. The reason is that when we want to buy a product or find a solution to an issue, we first search for it on Google.
If you use the correct SEO strategies to target the audience in your business niche, there’s a high chance that you’ll get many potential buyers.
For example, say that you sell running shoes. In this case, you can target keywords like running shoes for sale, the best running shoes, unisex running shoes, etc. Many will search for these terms on Google – out of which – at least a few can end up being potential buyers.
So, if you correctly optimize your website or content for SEO, your website can rank well in the search results, making it visible to potential customers 24/7. This takes us to the next point…
4. SEO works 24/7
SEO can bring your business leads and sales at any time – all day round. The same isn’t the case with other marketing strategies.
For example, say that you utilize direct emailing to drive leads. In this case, when you aren’t sending emails, your sales or leads will halt.
As for SEO, if you manage to make your website rank high on the search results, it will always be visible to potential buyers regardless of their location and time – except during Google server errors – which occur rarely.
5. SEO improves the user experience
On-page and off-page SEO are essential factors both for SEO and user experience.
Here are some on-page and off-page SEO factors that correlate SEO and user experience.
- Loading speed – If your website loads fast, it’ll enhance the user experience and boost your website’s rankings.
- Content (paragraph) structure – If your content has the correct keyword density (number of keywords), it’s ready to rank well and get a good number of visitors. Moreover, structuring paragraphs short, including appealing elements like infographics, images, statistics, etc., can further enhance the user experience.
- Internal links – Internal links can help the search engines to understand the site structure, and it helps to spread the link equity across the website. As for user experience, internal links benefit by making the navigation across the website more effortless.
- Mobile optimization – Nowadays, many people browse the web through their smartphones. However, many web developers fail to make the website mobile-friendly, severely impacting the SEO and user experience. Thus, if you want to build a successful business through your website, it’s essential to make it mobile-friendly.
As you can see, if you create content that fulfills the SEO part, you can be assured that the user experience will improve. A good user experience will make people realize that your business is professional, which will, in turn, increase your sales.
6. SEO can increase the lead generation to your physical business
If you’re running a physical business, I highly suggest you give Local SEO a try. The Local SEO strategy can tremendously boost your lead generation.
Great! But what is the exact definition of Local SEO?
Local SEO is a strategy that can increase the visibility of your physical business in your locality. Thus, if your business serves a geographical area, you’ll find Local SEO beneficial. However, be noted that this technique isn’t much applicable for online businesses.
According to a recent study, they found out that many people started to search on Google to discover the business in their localities. To be honest, I myself have used Google several times to find businesses near my location. I’m pretty sure that many people do the same.
If you want your physical business to gain even higher exposure, you can add your business to Google My Business.
7. SEO delivers fantastic Return on Investment (ROI)
SEO is a strategy that offers top-notch Return On Investment (ROI).
As mentioned before, an investment of less than $100 is sufficient to get started with SEO; however, you can make a lot more money in return.
In general, the SEO techniques are skill-based, and it doesn’t require much investment.
If you’re a small business owner, I highly recommend you to learn the SEO strategies as it will be beneficial.
If you don’t have SEO skills, you can hire an SEO specialist or work with an SEO agency, but they will be expensive. So, if you’re a small business with less money to spare, doing the SEO yourself can increase your ROI.
8. SEO lets you know more about your customers
As you start optimizing your website for SEO, you can get to know what people are expecting from you.
For example, say that you run a fast-food restaurant. Also, consider that your website has various blogs on the dishes you offer. Now, depending on the click-through rate (CTR) and the interaction of people with your blog, you can get to know the meals that people prefer the most.
Next, depending on the data, prepare more dishes that people prefer and start scaling your business by marketing them to a broader audience.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to collect the data and analyze your audience’s interaction with your website.
9. Bonus point: SEO increases the brand awareness
The standout benefits of SEO are that it’s long-term, cost-effective, and drives potential buyers. Increasing brand awareness is the extra benefit that SEO offers besides all other advantages.
In my opinion, since increasing brand awareness is not the primary interest of SEO, other strategies do a better job.
If boosting brand awareness is your primary goal, I suggest PPC over SEO. The reason is that through PPC, you can quickly reach a more extensive range of audiences. They may not be potential buyers, but you can make them aware of your business.
Traditional marketing also does a fine job in boosting brand awareness. However, they are generally much expensive than the digital marketing alternatives.
Does your business require SEO?
YES! In this era, if you want to scale your business to the next level, you should start utilizing SEO.
For many businesses, SEO may not come under the primary requirements. However, regardless of your business category, SEO can help in increasing your sales and revenue tremendously.
Moreover, if you want to make passive income, you can confidently rely on SEO. It’s more effective than traditional marketing, and it’s also more effective than many other digital marketing strategies.
For example, if you compare SEO with PPC, SEO has 20% more traffic opportunities. However, PPC is a fantastic strategy that can help you to make quick sales.
Ok, Great!
White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
There are two different approaches to make a website rank well on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
1. White Hat SEO
If your SEO strategies go well with the rules set by the search engine, you’re following the White Hat SEO approach.
White Hat SEO is the correct approach to grow your website’s traffic and build your business.
2. Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO is the opposite of White Hat SEO.
If your SEO strategies don’t abide by the rules set by the search engine, you’re following the Black Hat SEO approach.
In other words, the Black Hat SEO approach is when you follow deceptive techniques to fool the search engines.
If you follow the Black Hat SEO approach, search engines can ban your website, which means you’re missing a massive revenue-generating opportunity.
Some of the Black Hat SEO strategies include:
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
- Publishing highly plagiarized content
- Keyword stuffing
- Doorway pages
- Sending automated queries to Google
- Creating malicious pages
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing strategies that businesses should utilize.
Fortunately, many business owners have understood the significance of the SEO strategy, and they started to build it.
If you’re just getting started with your business and don’t have sufficient money to get your brand on the billboard or magazines, you can surely give SEO a try. The SEO strategy will help you make passive income – the freedom lifestyle that many people dream of living.
Fantastic!
I hope this blog gave you a clear idea about the importance of SEO for businesses.
Before concluding the blog, I have a few questions that I would like you to answer in the comment section below.
- Will you implement SEO for your business?
- What do you think about the influence of SEO in your business?
- Do you have any questions regarding SEO?
