Does My Business Need SEO?

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of improving the traffic on a website and getting it to rank higher on search engines. It involves improving the quantity and the quality of the website content to drive better website traffic through online search.

This traffic that websites get through SEO is called organic traffic and this term helps in differentiating it from the traffic that is paid for. While Search Engine Optimization is unpaid, organic traffic, the paid traffic is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Research by Search Engine Watch has revealed that about 94% of the total SERPs clicks end up in organic results.

How Does SEO Work? 

Search Engines like Google and several others work on complex algorithms that help in determining which pages should be shown in the search results of any questions and queries. These set of rules analyse and use several different factors for ranking the SERPs.

According to Backlinko, Google uses more than 200 factors in its algorithm for website ranking purposes. Out of the hundreds of factors however, there are three main factors or metrics that the majority of search engines use to assess the quality of a website to rank it in search. These are:-

• Links: Link is the first metric that helps determine the rank of websites on search engines and the sites that have links from several other websites tend to get noticed in the search engines and tend to rank better. It is especially good if the links are from quality sites because you as a website owner would not add poor links on your platform.
• Content: The second metric that SEO focuses on is the content on the websites to determine if the content is worth publishing as search results. On-page SEO focuses on keywords in the content and accordingly helps in improving the content to get better rankings.
• Structure of the Page: The third important metric in SEO is the structure of the page, which is essentially the structure of the HTML code. HTML is used for writing web pages and can help in determining the search engine results. In order to improve the SEO ranking for their website, you can add relevant keywords in headers, content and URL of the page while ensuring that users can crawl through the web pages.

Why Do You Need SEO For Your Business?

SEO is one of the most important parts of your business’s marketing strategies and every business should invest in SEO to help optimize your website and implement more effective strategies for marketing your business! Here are some reasons why you need SEO for your business:-

1.    SEO Brings In Quality Traffic

SEO helps in driving genuine and quality traffic to your website and the reason for this is that people are really looking for the answers that you are publishing in the form of content on your platform. They are also interested in and searching for your products and services and thus you would be able to drive good organic traffic.

According to reports by Moz, about 8% of searches are phrased in the form of a question. Furthermore, Sparktoro has revealed that out of the total web traffic across the world, 59.2% is the result of Google organic search. SEO can help you get quality traffic without having to invest in advertisements.

2.    SEO Helps Decrease Your Cost Per Acquisition

If you do not have any experience or rather commercial experience in coding and Google algorithms, SEO is an essential tool for your business to help grow its ranking. SEO can help in decreasing the cost per acquisition of your business because it is in a way free.

The traffic driven through SEO is unpaid and organic traffic so you need not pay for each customer or visitor you acquire on your platform. The only investment would be the one you make to buy and implement the SEO tools and services. According to Databox, 70% of marketers believe that SEO results are much better than the results of PPC.

3.    24/7 Promotions Through SEO

One of the major benefits of SEO is that it is active 24/7 and is constantly working to get your website a higher ranking. These rankings do not go down when you are not actively doing anything on your platform and helps in increasing your website traffic and potential leads every day.

When your platform achieves a high rank on the search engines, SEO will carry out the promotion of your brand irrespective of whether you are or aren’t active any time of the day. Backlinko revealed that the average bounce-rate is about 50% for the top-ranking pages.

4.    SEO Keeps Your Customers Updated and Informed

Like we have mentioned before, your audience and customers are actually looking for your content through their search. Therefore, posting value-adding and quality content can help you in keeping your customers informed and updated about the latest trends and more.

Higher SEO ranking means you can reach out to a larger audience and get more genuine customers who can eventually benefit from products, services, and/or content and reach informed decisions and conclusions. This eventually helps you build trust in your customers. According to HubSpot, about 61% of marketers favour SEO boosting and organic strategies and include them in their inbound marketing plans.

5.    SEO Helps Increase Your Customer Attribution And Website Referrals

Attribution refers to the number of times your brand appears before your audience. As SEO helps improve your ranks in search engines, your brand is more likely to appear in search results. In this way your audience will know more about your brand and are more likely to purchase your products and services, thus increasing your attribution points and touchpoints.

Furthermore, a strong and effective SEO tool can help you increase your website referrals immensely from search engines and when your audience and customers refer your website to their family and friends. According to Omnicore, 50% of browsers are more likely to click on a particular brand name if it has shown up multiple times in their search results.

6.    SEO Can Help Small Businesses Grow

Being a small business owner is not an easy task because the products that you are selling might be overlooked when the same products are being sold by bigger names in the market. In such situations, SEO can prove to be extremely useful as it can help you increase your ranks and thus the attribution points. More attribution points leads to more potential customers and leads and in turn more sales.

Plus, SEO is not as expensive as advertising. While many big shots in the business work are using advertising, you can compete with them with lesser investment. Make sure that you research and invest in an effective SEO tool for more creative and result-oriented strategies. Search Engine Roundtable revealed that 46% of Google searches are for a local business or a local service.

7.    SEO Contributes To The Safety Of Your Platform

A strong SEO strategy and tool will keep a check on the activity on your platform and will make sure that you keep your website safe. Without relevant measures to secure your website, your rankings have little chance of improvement. Reports by Blue Cactus have revealed that a relevant search influences as many as 39% of consumers.

In this way, it will give your customers a safe platform to explore, without them having to worry about viruses and fraudulent activities. A secure website is likely to have a crucial impact on your SEO ranks and a safe platform can help your brand build trust in your consumers and loyal customers.

8.    SEO Increases Speed and Improves User Experience On Your Website

SEO can help you rectify certain bugs on your website and thus improve the functionality of the website, making it quicker and increasing the speed of navigation and other processes. The better the speed of your website, the better is the user experience on it. With an improved user experience, your SEO rankings also improve. It is important to remember that speed is not the only factor that can improve user experience.

Everything that you put up on your website should be relevant and genuine to help improve the user experience. High speed and effortless user experience can contribute massively to the growth of your business. In a research conducted by Unbounce, about 70% of consumers agreed that the speed of a website impacts their purchase decisions and the willingness to buy from a particular business or retailer.

We hope that the article was helpful in understanding the urgent need of implementing SEO in your business and how it can prove to be beneficial for your business. The rapid growth of SEO and the increasing favourable statistics all point towards the need of SEO in businesses of all nature and sizes.

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Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.