A carefully designed SEO strategy helps your content become more visible and drive relevant leads to your website.

By Tony Greene

If you own a business and use your website to promote and grow it, then leveraging a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is the most reliable and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Optimizing your web pages makes your business discoverable by improving your Google rankings and driving organic traffic to your website.

Over time, search engines and their algorithms have changed. So have customer expectations. While previous techniques like keyword stuffing are now obsolete and even condemned, a more refined process has emerged. What hasn’t changed is that high-quality content offering value to the user can get buoyed by thoughtfully integrated keywords.

If you want to improve your visibility, it’s important to be current with the latest trends and standards for getting noticed.

So, what is Search Engine Optimization, really?

Search Engine Optimization is the systematic method of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. This means that your website and content pages naturally show up in the search results of people truly looking for your services. These are the people that want what you are offering, and they are the most likely to click through to your site and engage with you. And why is the focus on search engines so important? Because the search engine is the number one digital tool used by people looking for solutions to their problems. According to Search Engine Journal, the top search engine by a long shot is Google, with a 92.26% market share:

If you love stats, I have more for you. Google processes more than 40,000 search queries per second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day, and 1.2 trillion searches per year. That’s an annual compounded growth rate average of 50.34% over 12 years! Google’s dominance is the reason why standard SEO practices are geared toward improving your visibility on Google. However, the steps you take to improve the ranking of your site will help your standing on all search engines.

How Search Engines Work

If you want to know how search engines work, there are plenty of great articles on the topic, including How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking, which offers a great simplified overview. The short of it is this: Before your website can appear in search results, its pages must be correctly crawled and indexed by search engines, which scour the internet and find new web pages. These pages are added to the search engine’s index, which keeps a record of all pages it has crawled. But as the webmaster you need to set these pages up in a way that allows the search engines to discover them and rank them according to their relevance. If you don’t do this properly, search engines will leave your pages out of search queries.

8 Reasons Why SEO Will Benefit Your Business

More important than understanding how search engines work is knowing what great SEO will do to grow your business. Let’s look at the 8 most important benefits of creating an SEO plan:

1. Drives Free Traffic

SEO sends you traffic you don’t have to pay for by bringing qualified customers to your doorstep where you present them with all the information they need about your business. If you do your homework and build the right strategy, you won’t need to bother with paid ads from PPC traffic.

2. Grows Revenue

Not obvious, but obviously if you are attracting the customers that are actually searching for your services, you have struck SEO gold. These are the customers that are going to spend time on your website, reviewing your content, and clicking through to speak to a sales representative. The key to this customer journey lies in strategic SEO planning and creating organic content that interests your prospective clients.

3. Builds Brand Awareness

The more that people search and engage with your brand online, the faster your brand will grow and the higher you will rank. Branding is everything when it comes to driving sales and you can leverage SEO to build and grow your brand online. There are many to do that, including using branded keywords, ranking for navigational keywords, implementing local SEO strategies, and the list goes on. All in all, SEO helps you grow your brand awareness.

4. Provides Measurable Results

Using free tools such as Google Analytics, you can measure the traffic, conversions, leads, and the source of conversion including the time taken by it to convert. Some of the essential KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to track in SEO include organic traffic, keyword rankings, search visibility, session duration, organic CTR, and bounce rate.

5. Helps Long-Term Business Goals

As with any fine wine, it takes time for SEO to do its job and improve your rankings, especially when you are up against businesses that may have been building an online presence for many years longer than you. I’m not going to lie, there is no instant gratification in the SEO game, but the sooner you get started, the sooner you will begin to reap the rewards. Think of SEO as a marathon. Improving your website’s design, user experience, products, and content will build the endurance you will need to outrank your competitors in the long run.

6. Improves Offline Sales

In this digital era, everyone is searching for an online brand or store before visiting it offline. Potential customers are looking for the products, reviews, testimonials, and track record before visiting offline brick and mortar operations.

So, if you’re already running a business offline, investing your time and money on SEO can help your business grow exponentially. According to this study, 82% of smartphone users research a product with their phone before they make their final purchase in-store offline. The study also found that 45% of consumers read reviews online before making a purchase offline. Several surveys suggest that 90% of people are influenced by online reviews when making a significant purchase.

7. Drives Targeted Traffic to Your Website

One of the biggest benefits of SEO is that if you do it right, it sends you targeted traffic. Targeted visitors convert to sales! If you’ve created the correct the sales funnel, you’ll be making a ton of sales by generating traffic from search engines. An important way to drive targeted visitors from search engines to your website is by utilizing relevant keyword phrases, creating content that’s relevant to your target audience, teaches them something, and engages them. For more on this, see my blog series on The Importance of Being Engaging.

8. Helps You Acquire Backlinks

Search engines like Google favor websites that have more quality backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. There are basically two types of backlinks: “Dofollow” backlinks, which tell search engines to follow. These backlinks are essential in growing your search traffic. “Nofollow” backlinks, which tell the search engines to ignore the link. When adding backlinks, do your best to avoid toxic links from malicious or spammy websites.

In Conclusion

The role of SEO has expanded significantly over the last ten years. In particular, SEO helps consumers when in need, and implementing robust, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties will benefit brands and their marketing efforts. The digital world is always changing, always evolving, so its important to remember that updating SEO now will raise your business’s online presence but won’t future proof it. It’s important to stay current with new SEO trends and standards to stay ahead of the curve. What you do today is critical to your brand’s presence and relevance.