Why Your Business Needs SEO
SEO or search engine optimisation is often the most cost-effective and consistent way to bring traffic and potential customers to your business website. However, many businesses still often ignore this traffic medium.
There are multiple reasons why some businesses choose to ignore SEO: a lack of SEO understanding, poor experiences with shady SEO agencies in the past, and not realising how important SEO is as a traffic-generation channel.
In this blog post, we will try our best to remedy the third situation. We will list a few big reasons why your business needs SEO and why you should not neglect it.
1. The most cost-effective channel
In the long term, SEO proves to be the most cost-effective channel for traffic and lead generation.
Once you have built the right SEO foundation for your website and your pages start ranking for important keywords, traffic comes in almost automatically and without spending more money on it.
On the other hand, if you are generating traffic from a paid medium, such as Google Ads, traffic stops as soon as you stop spending.
That makes SEO or Search Engine Optimisation the most cost-effective channel when it is set up and running.
2. Huge market share
Compared to other marketing channels, such as social media or email marketing, search has the biggest market share.
Whenever a potential customer wants information, more often than not, they would use a search engine (such as Google) than, say, using a social media website like Facebook
3. Authority
Authority and credibility play vital roles in the success of an online business. Anybody can buy their way to the top with Google Ads — that does not add credibility.
However, when your business name pops up for a relevant search query (such as ‘best plumbing service in Liverpool’), that adds a ton of credibility.
Online searchers (potential customers) see your business as an authority in your niche and you as an expert in your industry.
4. Insights into customers’ needs, intent, and motivations
Organic data also gives you valuable insights into your customers’ needs, wants, intent, and motivations. This data can be used to not only improve your business website’s SEO, but you can also use it to improve other areas and departments of your business.
When you look at organic data in Google Analytics, you see what your customers search for, what they want, and how they engage with your website once they land on it after using a certain search query.
In addition, SEO also helps you understand macro shifts in your industry or niche. You see which products are becoming more popular, how your customers’ search patterns have changed over a period of time, and what is gaining more traction on the SERPs.
5. SEO helps improve user experience
Not many online businesspersons may realize this, but good SEO helps improve the user experience on your business website.
You cannot optimize your website for SEO if it does not offer an excellent user experience. This is especially true nowadays with the introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals and other factors related to page and user experience.
A good user experience not only improves user engagement, but it also helps with a higher conversion rate — which is vital for the revenue and financial health of your online business.
6. Automation
Perhaps one of the best parts of search engine optimisation or SEO is that once set up, it almost works on autopilot.
You do not have to revisit every page and manually optimize it every week. Pages that are ranking for relevant keywords continue to bring in targeted traffic, leads, and customers, month after month.
Organic traffic to your website won’t stop as soon as you stop your SEO-related activities. But that is the case with most other digital marketing channels. For example, to get more traffic via email marketing, you have to continue crafting and sending emails. As soon as you stop sending emails, traffic from that medium stops coming to your website.
Moreover, with new content and further optimisations, you build on top of the foundation you already have and increase your organic traffic potential by exploring new keywords and topics.
Lastly, this automation allows you to focus on other areas of your online business.
Conclusion
As you can see, SEO is an integral part of today’s online business — and one that you must not neglect.
Apart from bringing in free, consistent traffic in an automated fashion, SEO also gives you valuable insights into your customers’ intent and wants. Moreover, it also helps you understand macro market shifts in a timely manner as well as encourages you to improve the user experience on your business website.
Make sure you are fully utilizing this extremely important traffic-generation channel to its full capacity.
