Statistics show that the number of online shoppers has increased by 40% during the last five years and is now 2.14 billion. With the world population reaching 8.2 billion, that is 26.1% of the total population. It is the highest number ever recorded, and it’s increasing exponentially.
With these stats, having a good online presence is more important than ever. This could be possible only via permanent visibility methods like search engine optimisation (SEO). It ensures that your website is easily discoverable and can attract organic traffic.
What is SEO?
To understand how important SEO is for your business, you must first understand what it is and how it works.
SEO refers to optimising your website so that search engines can rank it organically and increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic. The better ranking your web pages have, the better are the chance for your business to thrive online.
The question arises: There are many other methods to drive traffic to your website, so why SEO? That’s true. Many different mediums, such as PPC, are available.
PPC refers to bringing traffic to your site by paying for every click. PPC’s results are quite quick, but why is SEO the top method?
The reason lies in the stats and psychology of humans. Around 94% of people immediately skip Google ads, and they consider these ads to be suspicious. People immediately know that they are being sold something through these ads and that their information is being collected; thus, they tend to skip it.
How Do Search Engines Work?
To perform better in the online world, you need to understand how search engines behave and work.
Although they are bots, they are quite sophisticated. Search engines crawl billions of pages to discover new content. Once crawled, search engines organise these pages and put them under their specific category. This stage is known as indexing. This stage helps search engines understand the content and its semantic context and then determine its place based on various factors.
When a user makes a query related to your submitted page, if search engines find it suitable to show, it will appear in the search results. This stage is called the ranking stage.
Under the umbrella of SEO, over 200 factors are considered for ranking a website, thus ensuring all three stages are being served right, but PPC doesn’t have such a detailed mechanism.
Importance of SEO for Your Business
With changes like the Industrial Revolution, urbanisation, and pandemics like COVID-19, people are becoming short on time. This shortage has made them more dependent on technological advancements.
They are now flocking online to make purchases. Such influxes have forced businesses to maintain an online presence, and they are now in competition to stay visible and on top. SEO is the only friend who is welcoming them and is capable of helping.
Let’s see what possible ways businesses can benefit from SEO.
1. Increase Your Leads Generation
One of SEO’s primary functions is increasing lead generation. Since SEO lets you target the keywords your end users are searching for, generating helpful content around these keywords will increase traffic.
Thus, it serves as an inbound marketing technique, which is three times more effective than an outbound one. It brings pre-qualified and interested traffic to your website, and we already know that high-quality leads, even at the top of the funnel, are more likely to convert.
2. Increased Visibility and Traffic
SEO also helps you increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). Visibility on SERP is important as approximately 8 million blog posts are written daily, and you must stand out from such rigorous competition.
It can also help you optimise your content and win over such a competition. Likewise, it lets you incorporate the searched keywords into your content, headings, tags, and other important areas like meta description. By targeting more keywords and covering all aspects of those keywords, you increase your chances of ranking higher and higher.
3. Cost-Effectiveness
With a solid strategy or choosing the right agency for your SEO, like Brandix Soft, you can drive organic traffic cost-effectively.
Over 93% of users start a search on search engines, and 71% of B2B start doing their research with a simple Google search; thus, if you rank by writing good-quality content, you have a chance of landing them on your site.
Similarly, in PPC, you are supposed to pay for any click on your landing page, even if some marketer is searching or the customer doesn’t like your page. However, in SEO, you will pay the SEO expert only, or if you do it yourself, then that cost can even be cut down.
Likewise, your site ranking will disappear the moment you stop your PPC ads, but in the case of SEO, the ranking attained is much more permanent and long-lasting.
4. Helps in Building Credibility and Trust
The problem with building credibility and trust is that it takes time not only in the offline world but in the online as well. This credibility-building stuff is even more difficult now with the advent of AI, making it so easy to create content within no time.
People slowly start trusting you if you keep adding value to their lives. SEO follows the principle of EEAT, which is given by the most famous search engine, Google, which specialises in experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This means you need to know at least the field you are talking about or be an expert in it.
Such a principle allows any good SEO professional to build trust easily. It also helps produce good content and has a clean and effective user interface that serves as the basis for showing your business as a quality one in front of users.
Likewise, the more channels you can touch and build your credibility, the more likely search engines will rank you, which is another key job of an SEO professional.
SEO also helps build natural links, encourages positive user behaviour, and optimises on-page signals, which again develop your credibility in the eyes of search engines and will ultimately push you higher in ranking.
5. Enhances User Experience
Search engines prioritise user experience, and as everyone wants better results and higher ranking, it has become a priority for every good marketer out there.
Customers know what they want, and if they don’t find it on your page, they will not stay a second longer. Likewise, if your site has navigational issues or information is difficult to find, why would someone like to stay on your site? On the other side, search engines are intelligent enough to track down their consumer behaviour. If a particular website is not serving its customers, they will lower its ranking.
SEO resolves this problem. SEO experts focus especially on website development, content optimisation, navigational issues, and other related aspects that will improve the user experience.
Not only this, but these experts help the developers build the website so that search engines find it easy to crawl, index, and rank, thus taking care of the end users and the engines.
6. Target High-Quality Audience
SEO is a strategy that lets you target your audience cost-efficiently. Users have different intents while searching; thus, you need to understand these intents and craft a plan that matches the intent of your user and your business needs. Afterwards, craft good content around these selected keywords that match their needs and expectations.
Likewise, SEO lets you focus on UX, again a metric to attract a high-quality audience. It also helps you build credibility by gaining customer reviews and testimonials, again a green signal for quality traffic.
7. Staying Competitive
Search engines and SEO are constantly evolving. SEO touches all the stages of a marketing funnel, helping you facilitate your other marketing strategies and maintain a higher competitive edge over your competitors.
Tracking your users’ search activity, constantly updating your content, and searching for new content opportunities keep you updated on current market trends.
SEO services cover a wide range of topics, and one is quite important for any business: SEO competitor analysis.
SEO Competitor Analysis
SEO competitor analysis is sneaking into your competitor’s strategy by looking for their strengths and weaknesses, keyword ranking and possible keyword opportunities, and their marketing strategy.
Just like you conduct a competitor analysis for the feasibility of your business, SEO competitor analysis watches out for your online competitors and lets you know whom to follow.
Importance of Competitive Analysis for Your Business
SEO competitor analysis is important for your business in several ways. The reasons could be the following:
- This procedure lets you understand and track the possible opportunities for a keyword gap, create content around it, and attract relevant traffic.
- By competitor analysis, you can understand what sort of content is best liked by the end users.
- You can also analyse your competition to determine where they are possibly building their backlinks. Quality backlinks help you build credibility and trust in the eyes of the user.
How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis
This section will cover how to conduct a competitor analysis of your competitor’s website.
- First of all, you need to identify your competition. You can easily do that by searching for the keywords they are ranking for or using paid tools like Semrush or Ahref. Compare yourself with four to six of the best competitors out there. Shortlist only those who can or are directly impacting your business.
- Once you identify your competitor, you must identify the pages you want to compare. This is important as a website may contain hundreds and thousands of pages, and you cannot check all of them. Thus, select the important pages like home, equivalent product pages and other browse and informative pages.
- Conduct keyword gap analysis and look for what content they have produced around these keywords.
- Check out their overall website design, navigational support, user experience, social media and other backlinking methodologies, and analysis of their Google local search pack.
- Note down all opportunities to work on and work on these. Create good content, optimise the existing content, and constantly update your content as desired.
Can SEO be used for Every Business Type?
SEO is such a great technique that it can help almost any sort of business out there. Everyone can get their piece of cake, from startups to typical brick-and-mortar businesses.
Whether you have a small company or a mid-level business, you can use SEO as long as you have an online presence. Just make sure that you are using the updated SEO strategies, as search engines keep on bringing new updates to maintain quality content.
Staying updated in your industry will help you understand the current trends and create content around them. Also, make sure to do a thorough keyword analysis.
This analysis will help you understand the competition, keyword intent, relevance to your topic, and search volume. All these points are necessary as you write content on a keyword with a lot of competition.
Likewise, if you don’t understand keyword intent, all the hard work will be wasted as the wrong traffic will visit your content. This will also send search engines a message that you are irrelevant to the category, thus negatively impacting your ranking. The same goes for the search volume and relevance to your topic.
Keyword Research is the Foundation
Keyword research refers to finding out the popular search terms people use to find businesses like yours. Afterwards, you strategically use these phrases in your content so that you can appear higher on search engine results pages.
Generally, a good keyword is one that is frequently searched online by your target audience, relates to the topic of your content, and ranks your website higher.
As a business, you must analyse your keywords. This will enable the market team to focus on them and generate the best results. Thus, it would be best if you put special emphasis on keyword research, as it will tell you about search volume, competition, intent, and relevance to your business.
Conclusion
SEO’s role in online marketing is important. Any business can use it. Ensure you do good keyword research, keep your content updated, and make the necessary changes according to the search engine’s algorithms.
