Have you ever wondered how to reel in more visitors to your website? Have you ever been curious about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how your business can benefit from it? In this article, you’ll find out exactly what SEO is, why it’s vital for business in today’s digital world, and how you can begin reaping its rewards.
Search Engine Optimization Basics
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is a collection of powerful strategies and actions for enhancing your online presence in order to drive as much traffic to your website as possible with the goal of converting those website visitors into customers. Businesses and marketing agencies use these strategies to ensure their sites and content are highly visible to the most online users at any given time. More people engaged in your content means more potential customers.
SEO is also unique in that it doesn’t involve paid ads. Instead of shouting from the rooftops to get people’s attention, SEO is more like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to lead those people to your site. This is what we call “organic” or “natural” web traffic because there was no direct solicitation involved.
Some of the more common SEO strategies and actions you’ll find brands using include on-site/page SEO analysis and optimization, blog writing, social media marketing, citation management, and review marketing.
How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?
In today’s world, whenever someone wants more information on a product or service, the first place they turn to is an online search engine, which is almost always Google according to data from Pew Research. These search engines crawl, index, and organize millions of data to analyze and select the most relevant results. SEO involves making small changes to the way you present and manage your online content so that it is more discoverable by these engines, which in turn brings you as near to the top of search results as possible.
The main way to do this is by using the right keywords to develop highly engaging and shareable content for your website, social media profiles, or opportunities to be a guest author for websites or blogs owned by other brands (backlinks, yay!). Marketing agencies will use website and competitor analysis tools–like Google Analytics, Ahrefs or Semrush–to find out what people are searching for online, what kind of content is getting the most attention, and which websites/competitors are dominating the search engine results page rankings.
By modifying their own website content to stay up to date with the most popular results and by using the right keywords in their writing, search engines begin recognizing that as higher quality content that is more relevant to what users are searching for. The more effectively brands can execute this, the higher they will rank on search engines and the more visible their content will be to users and potential customers.
Why Should I Care?
If you rely on the internet to help make money or promote your business, a strong SEO strategy is absolutely necessary. In 2022 and beyond, if potential customers can’t easily find you online, that presents a threat to the livelihood of your business and is a huge missed opportunity for maximizing your growth. Furthermore, if you aren’t utilizing SEO, rest assured that your competition is, and every edge counts if you want to end up on top.
As mentioned before, SEO doesn’t involve direct advertising–you let visitors and potential customers (who are already searching for a product or service like yours) find you on their own. That’s less work for you in the long run and the number and quality of your leads will be higher on average compared to typical sales/advertising/cold calling tactics.
Here are a few stats that highlight the power of an effective SEO strategy:
- 63% of all shopping begins online, even if the purchase itself happens in a store.
- Google currently has 86.86% of the search engine market.
- On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.6% of all the clicks.
- 86% of people ignore paid banner ads, choosing to only click on organic search results.
- 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel.
- Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (ex. cold-calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate.
Where Do I Go from Here?
There are lots of resources online that can provide a great basic overview of SEO and all its moving parts, but if you’re starting from scratch it can be difficult to make sense of it all and it can be tricky to figure out the best place to begin. The quickest way to start reaping the rewards of SEO is to lean on a marketing agency with the knowledge and experience to make your online presence the best it can be.
For any questions, please feel free to contact us here at any time. Cheers! October 3, 2022
Mike McNeill
