In the office, in the online world, on social media, on the phone, in the chat, everywhere people talk about SEO. Everybody who has a business has heard about SEO. But also anyone who has a business probably said at least once: Do I really need SEO? What can SEO do for me?
Since the moment SEO appeared in our lives, everybody in the field started talking about it. It became a never-ending discussion. We want to know all the facets of SEO. Why is SEO important? And this is what you’re about to find out: Top SEO benefits to inspire you and never let you underestimate search engine optimization.
Curiosity flourished and we wanted to put it simply into words and see the key benefits of SEO in the life of a business. We found 21 reasons why SEO is crucial to any business living on the internet.
- SEO Blends into Your Marketing Funnel
- SEO Helps You Get into the Spotlight
- SEO Creates a Stronger Relationship with the Audience
- SEO Pulls out Traffic
- SEO Is Cost Effective Comparing to PPC
- SEO Is Live 24/7
- SEO Increases Sales and Leads
- SEO Improves Your ROI
- SEO Has the Greatest Impact on Lead Generation
- SEO Traffic Is More Convertible
- SEO Increases Brand Awareness
- SEO Increases Marketing Attribution
- SEO Is One of the Best PR Strategy
- SEO Improves CTR
- SEO Can Eliminate Cold-Calling
- SEO Builds Trust and Credibility
- SEO Is a Long-Term Strategy
- More Effective Than Other Traditional Strategies
- SEO Can Help You Attract Great Individuals
- SEO Isn’t the Final Step, but the Center of Things
- SEO Can Boost Your Efficiency
Some us even keep talking while sleeping or keep thinking about SEO while staying in traffic or cooking and so on (*half-joking*). But leaving the joke aside, SEO doesn’t sleep. It’s alive. If done right, it keeps your website alive, too, right there on the first page of Google, getting the attention of someone that might buy something from your site or recommend it to others.
If we’re looking at the evolution of the interest people put into SEO, we can see how beautifully it has grown over the years and it is constantly changing.
SEO is like the popular kid in school. Everybody talks about it. There are some groups that worship it and follow everything what it is doing, but there are also some groups that hate it, don’t like it and speak badly about it.
1. SEO Blends into Your Marketing Funnel
Your marketing funnel starts when the prospect hears about your brand in the awareness stage. It will continue when your brand generates interest, desire and will make them take an action afterward.
Source: www.aweber.com
SEO blends in all the stages of your marketing funnel. The most important step is the first one, when you hook the user. But he must find your website. You need search engine optimization to get there, on the first page.
The inbound marketing sales funnel has three stages: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU). Each stage requires a proper set of marketing tactics and techniques, which includes SEO. So, when I was saying that SEO starts right at the top of the funnel, that happens because there is your audience, and you want to attract a larger portion of it.
Track top of funnel keywords (informational keywords), create content maps and make your site’s structure user-friendly to keep the user as long as you can on your website and you’ll push them down the funnel. In the TOFU stage, the user will land on your blog, which is the most common type of content.
For the middle of funnel, your focus should be on creating high-quality content and have hooks on your website that will keep the user, such as a high loading speed, high quality and lossless images, mobile-friendly website, un-broken pages and lots of other technical SEO requirements. Technical SEO has a great impact on the user’s behavior.
Engaging the users and sending them down the sales funnel can be achieved through CTAs, surveys, content downloads.
At the bottom of funnel you must persuade the user with other techniques. But up to this point, SEO blends very well in each stage of the funnel.
2. SEO Helps You Get into the Spotlight
When we talk about search engine optimization, we talk about creating the best version of our website to get user’s eyes, which nowadays means to be on the first page. And that turns out to be a pain in the neck most of the time.
But it doesn’t need to be annoying. If you follow the natural path of things, SEO can help you achieve the desired position. Hard work and dedication can come a long way.
A content audit is needed at this stage, to understand the actual status and then decide what you have to optimize. For a correct content audit, you must gather all the articles into a spreadsheet, add metrics (such as CTR, organic search traffic, internal and external links, shares, comments, rank) and order them to see the pages with the lowest metrics.
www.contentmarketingup.com
Use a tool for content optimization and voilà. You have awesome content. Get in the spotlight by promoting it and earn lots of links. Once you’ve managed to get on the first page of Google, you’ll gain visitors, who might become clients. But once you’ve got there, you must work hard to stay put. After that you could take it up a notch. That means social sharing, emailing, promotion, internal linking in other pages that have high influence.
3. SEO Creates a Stronger Relationship with the Audience
If you managed to get on the first page in the search engines, that means you’ve gained the trust of Google or Bing. Which should lead to earning the trust of your audience.
Words play an important role in digital marketing and content is the pivot.
Content marketing is the most effective SEO technique. Websites with blog content have 434% more search engine-indexed pages than other business sites that don’t publish content.
If your page has a good user experience, the audience will like it and you have a great chance to create a strong relationship. But that is not the only indicator. Quality content with valuable information that answers the audience’s questions using their own words is another indicator.
Integrate a comment section in your blog to hear your audience. Make sure you filter the spammy comments before publishing them. User-generated content is a good sign of quality information. You can speak directly to your audience, hear their thoughts and opinions, allowing you to create a relationship quickly.
4. SEO Pulls out Traffic
Yes, that’s true. SEO can pull out qualified traffic. It turns out search engines drive 300% more traffic to sites than social media.
If done right, SEO can pull your website on the first page and from that moment you’ll have a lot to gain from. That means traffic, too. If your website is in the sight of the viewer, then most probably they will enter your website.
So, the better you optimize your website on-site (with a proper headline, URL, meta description, cover photo and pictures with alt-description), the higher the chances to attract the user on your website. You need to differentiate yourself from the others and be the unicorn in a crowd of donkeys, as Larry Kim often says.
| Create unicorn content. This is your best, most magical content, performing among the top 3 percent of all your content. | |
 | Larry Kim |
| CEO MobileMonkey & Founder WordStream | |
5. SEO Is Cost Effective Comparing to PPC
It is not justified that PPC is highly costly comparing to SEO, which is more effective. SEO has a longterm value, while PPC has a shorter lifetime value. As long as you pay, you’ll appear in Google; if you stop paying, then your ad will disappear.
PPC is better to use when you launch a product or your business because at that stage it is harder to get awareness using SEO. PPC works best for promoting products and commercial content because you invest money to gain clients and sales.
You invest in SEO for awareness, for web traffic and other metrics that lead to sales. But the thing is that you don’t need to invest so much money on SEO like you need on PPC.
SEO offers the better value in search marketing. That’s its true strenght.
Studies say that SEO has approximately 20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop. And Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization said that 87% of search engine dollars are spent on PPC vs. 11% spent on SEO efforts.
6. SEO Is Live 24/7
SEO can run free because it is live 24/7. Even when you’re sleeping, or you are offline, it can pull out your site and keep it in the sight of the visitors, because SEO never sleeps.
A unique perk of optimizing your website is the timeless characteristic. To understand how it works imagine you are looking for a specific product and searching the internet. Each webpage from SERP is like a store you walk in and look around to see if they got what you’re searching for. Those on the first page are open, near to you and well-known businesses (let’s say). If your page is there, then you might get a chance to get a new lead.
But unlike a store, which has open and closing hours, your website has SEO, which means it is open all the time and can receive the potential customers anytime.
Search engine optimization it is practically like an open sign.
7. SEO Increases Sales and Leads
Since we were talking about new leads and potential clients, SEO puts your website on the map and impacts the buying cycle.
The thing that differentiates it from other forms of marketing and adds value to it is the fact that sales will increase without having to increase proportionally your promotional costs.
You can start SEO and content with no monetary investment. But if you want to scale your business to get high revenue, then you’ll have to make some investments. In case you want to start with no monetary investment, then you’ll have to put more effort into creating high-linkable content, optimize for money keywords and keywords with a high volume and sustain your content with emailing, social media, syndication and other ways to promote it.
8. SEO Improves Your ROI
SEO can push your marketing goals to better ROI comparing to other forms of marketing. Your website can be a prospect magnet, based on your high-quality keyword and be where your customers are. If you are in the sight of the visitor, you’ll be able to direct them to your website and offer solutions to their questions/problems.
Your website should be the apple to the user’s pie. ❤
Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom, had quite a unique approach to the way SEO works as an investment for each business:
| SEO works very much like the stock market. You choose your stocks (keywords) based on the knowledge you have at hand, and then you wait. You’ll likely experience periods of growth and decline (like ranking fluctuations), but one thing is certain: the stock market and SEO are both long-term endeavors. There’s no quick path to riches in either case. | |
 | Jayson DeMers |
| Founder of AudienceBloom | |
SEO might have one of the biggest ROI compared to other marketing forms.
9. SEO Has the Greatest Impact on Lead Generation
The key to generating more leads for your business is optimizing your site for search engines. According to a study by NewsCreed, 57% of B2B marketers said that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation.
To generate revenue and expand the local area of your business you must take the online stage and dominate your competitors. The way to do that is to have a well-optimized website.
SEO has the ability to enable the flow of leads, but you have to help it and optimize the inner content through:
- fitted keywords with high search volumes;
- high loading speed time websites;
- quality content;
- get ahead of your competitors by spying on their content and their SEO strategies.
Search engine optimization plays an important role in cultivating organic traffic and generating leads. The message you transmit through your content is very important. Did they land on commercial or information content? There are money keywords and information keywords. Depending on what type of content they landed on your website, it will give you a more accurate insight on the level the sales funnel they came from: leads, prospects and in the end clients.
According to a report by Chitika Insights, it seems that number 1 position in Google gets 32.5 % of search traffic. And the first 5 positions account for 75.7% of the search traffic. That’s a strong indicator of the power of SEO. If your website is in the first 5 positions, then you’ll have a high chance of attracting leads.
10. SEO Traffic Is More Convertible
One other reason why SEO is crucial for any business online is the power of converting. Indeed, SEO traffic converts better. Search traffic converts 10x higher than the social media on desktops according to a study by SimilarWeb. Moreover, it seems like search is by far the largest traffic driver.
Studies talk by themselves. eMarketer discovered that 76% of US agencies worldwide said SEO provided excellent or good return on investment (ROI). Which better reason to stick to SEO, than these results?
If you’ve managed to find the working SEO strategy for you, then you can’t go wrong and you’ll benefit from juicy results. By positioning your website on the search engines, your business will gain more conversions.
11. SEO Increases Brand Awareness
Besides all the SEO benefits in the internet marketing field that we’ve talked about, SEO has the power to make your brand discovered and remembered, but you have to help it, as usual.
The sale funnel is a long process, so the visitor has a long way before converting. They might not be prepared to buy from you, but the fact that they entered your website is a good opportunity. They will be aware of what you’re offering before making an action.
SEO helps your website to get awareness.
Let’s say you’re searching for something online, for “how to dye your hair at home” and you want to know more about that. It is the first time dyeing your hair, you don’t know anything about it.
Just like in the example shown above, you find a website where you see informational content along with commercial one (example of product with the price and the name of the store). In case you have a website like this, you might get benefits if people are buying for those type of websites.
Being one of the top results will bring awareness to your website. People will know more about you and might search your website for other information and take other actions around there.
12. SEO Increases Marketing Attribution
When your brand awareness increases, the marketing attribution will increase as well. Attribution represents the number of actions (“touchpoints”) a visitor is taking on your website. Basically, it tracks down the events that engaged the user before converting them.
The more times users see your brand, the better chance to increase the marketing attribution. Better optimized pages, with quality content and trustworthy websites will get you more “touchpoints” from the users.
Unfortunately, just a small amount of marketers use attribution in their marketing strategy. A study by Delhi School of Internet Marketing says that 34.1% of businesses don’t use any attribution model to measure marketing performance. And that’s sad.
Businesses that don’t use attribution might lose 50% of potential sales.
Those who used attribution and lead nurturing generated 50% more sales at 33% lower cost.
13. SEO Is One of the Best PR Strategy
You heard that right, SEO is one of the best PR strategy. You might think they came from two different worlds, but in the online world, SEO takes the form of public relations.
We all know that PR is the practice of spreading information about something (brand, product) or someone in the public eye. SEO can do exactly the same thing. It will bring your brand to the public attention. But for that you need links and quality content, to rank in the top positions.
Links are a form of recognition for your website.
It means that those who linked to your website found useful and valuable information and want to share it to others. This type of action can be categorized as word-of-mouth and PR movement. The more links, the more visibility for your website.
14. SEO Improves CTR
Optimized pages, with a high CTR, influence rankings and achieve top positions. That will improve the results, and get high CTR again. It is an on-going process. SEO and CTR are influencing one another.
A website that is very-well optimized will get featured in SERP and will receive clicks, impressions. A top position in Google can have a high CTR.
| I can most certainly say with confidence that CTR is impacting rank. | |
| Larry Kim |
| CEO MobileMonkey & Founder WordStream | |
Usually, pages with a higher CTR tend to have higher conversion rates. Increasing your CTR by 2x will increase your conversion rate by 50%.
There are some ways to step up the game and increase your SEO and, therefore, your CTR:
- First, start by looking at those pages that have a low click-through-rate using Google Search Console (or Google Analytics):
- Then look at the pages or queries that have a low CTR but high position. Start by optimizing those pages and their snippets.
- Another thing you could do is look at the duplicate content on your website and remake the meta descriptions and title tags that are duplicated.
- Create unique titles that stand out in front of your competitors. Search for the keywords you want to rank in Google and look at the results you found. After that, create your headline by provoking an emotion.
15. SEO Can Eliminate Cold-Calling
Invest in SEO, rather than cold-calling. If you’re tired of sending emails, calling on the phone or performing other forms of outreach, then SEO is the only “call” you have to make. After all the reasons we’ve talked on why SEO is important, you can understand that it takes a few steps forward for your business and could eliminate cold calling.
It works pretty simply. Imagine you’d like to contact somebody regarding a proposition or collaboration idea. If you have a well-known brand due to your SEO efforts (that means that it appears in the search results pages for important and convertible keywords) and say you are John from X (the brand you’re representing), then you’ll have a higher chance to get noticed. The discussion can get to a positive result faster and the response rate can be higher.
16. SEO Builds Trust and Credibility
Google has lots of ranking factors and search quality raters that analyze and evaluate ranking websites and pages. Which only proves that Google takes a high interest in showing relevant, trustworthy and newsworthy content to the visitor. SEO on the same note is providing trust and credibility to the website. That type of strong indicators from a website will send quality signals to Google. Not to mention that SEO helps you grow your online reputation.
Sites that send a strong trustworthy signal have one or more of the following elements:
- HTTPS protocol;
- Security certification;
- Business blog with comments area;
- Social networking components;
- Current contact information;
- High-quality pictures, clean web design and great UX;
- Recent activity on site (easy to see through the blog);
- Social media activity (social signals have a strong impact on SEO).
17. SEO Is a Long-Term Strategy
It takes approximately 6 months to see optimal website rankings for a new site, and it can go up to 12 months. If you follow a natural path to grow a business online and follow Google’s quality guidelines to increase your website rankings, you have a high advantage. Because once you get a place in the top positions of Google you rarely change it. The only times you can see a decrease in rankings is due to Google algorithm updates or high competition. Studies have shown that search engine results had gotten more useful and relevant over time as 52% of consumers acknowledge.
The thing that I’ve seen working best for ranking in Google is content. Not any type of content, but quality content. The key is to create informational content and connect it with the commercial type (through internal linking) to create linkable content and grow up your website.
A blog can go a long way. 72% of marketers say relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic according to Ascend2.
18. More Effective Than Other Traditional Strategies
SEO has proved a lot of times to be more effective than any other traditional strategy (passing flyers, print advertising, television and radio or direct marketing) because the user is searching for something and receives the results. It is not exposed to a information that he doesn’t need at that moment (like it happens in the traditional marketing process).
The popularity of traditional marketing dropped over the years. Digital marketing started to rise and SEO has received the crown to rule over the empire.
We can see how broadcasting had a tremendous drop in searches in 2009. Direct marketing had a slow death. And SEO had a natural growth in the last years. We can’t say for certainty that was the real evolution of how traditional marketing involved and SEO evolved, but we can point out people’s interest in them.
SEO starts by creating amazing content. The fact is that content will persuade the user into making an action. 93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies, which can only prove the graphic from Google Trends.
19. SEO Can Help You Attract Great Individuals
If you have a strong website and people heard about you, you have a higher chance to attract talent. In case you have open positions in your company and you are searching for some individuals that could fit your team, SEO can be a great “tool”.
On the same topic, TripAdvisor did something really cool in one of their recruitment processes. They were searching for someone in IT and did that through the robots.txt:
So, either you are using your website to send a message to the future colleagues or offering information on sight, SEO can help you. If you optimize the page for the job you’re offering, you might save some money spent on dedicated platforms or other sorts of promotion.
20. SEO Isn’t the Final Step, but the Center of Things
I hear a lot of people that designed their website and left SEO at the end like it’s some magic powder you can spray on top. No! Wrong and wrong. When a new website is created, SEO is the first thing you should be considering, along with UX.
Take SEO into consideration when you develop your website’s architecture or decide the platform – CMS, the URL syntax, canonical URLs, other HTML codes important for having a reachable and clean website for the bots and users.
You wouldn’t like to be in the situation where you invested a lot of money in your website’s design and after that, you find out that Google doesn’t see your website as it should, the user doesn’t find the website in the search results or has a weird snippet. And after all that investment, you have to spend more money to resolve the issues and make it visible.
21. SEO Can Boost Your Efficiency
All the benefits of SEO that we’ve talked about until now will help your business grow. And SEO is the one that multiplies your efforts. It delivers what promised.
Optimizing your content will get you the benefit of getting a higher space into search, that means more keywords ranking on upper positions offering a higher visibility in SERP. We tried pushing the content optimization a step higher, by selecting a list of pages and making a massive content optimization a few months back.
Source: https://explorer.cognitiveseo.com/?u=cognitiveseo.com&m=*U*#section/4
As you can see the evolution of the search visibility started to have a beautiful increase since the moment we’ve optimized the pages.
SEO is a digital business card.
If you manage to improve the rankings on your website, you can beat up competition and you can beat up skepticism, which are two of the biggest fishes to catch.
Conclusion
The perks of search engine optimization are several. Every SEO expert you ask will tell you how beneficial is SEO for a website. SEO is laser-targeted, which means it can achieve great results and push your marketing goals upper. It is one of the smartest marketing investment you can make at the moment we speak because in online SEO is the form of marketing that has the longest lifespan vs. money spent.
SEO will help you spread your wings through all the web. You need to include it in your marketing mix because it is a lifevest for your business. You can’t survive without SEO, not now or never. It has lots of advantages that can bring awareness to your business and bring a higher impact on your marketing goals. Driving traffic to your website can be easier once you’ve gained a high position of Google due to a well-done SEO campaign.
Either you’re building an SEO campaign for the first time or you’re doing this for a long time, you must always remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, and also a continuous process of improvement. Use this guide to SEO to get the results you desire.
The post Why SEO Is Important to Any Business Nowadays. Top 21 SEO Benefits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
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