Digital marketing strategies have played a pivotal role in keeping some businesses afloat during the last two years of instability. With the current economic circumstances, many business owners see online marketing as playing a crucial role in their future success.
One lesson business owners are learning (other than checking twice to un-mute their mic during virtual meetings), is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important investments to grow their business online. When done correctly, SEO can provide a ROI at a consistent cost so you can use your marketing budget over time as your business grows for things like ad spend.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to increase the quality and quantity of leads when products or services are searched for on search engines, such as Google or Microsoft Bing. SEO can produce higher ranking search results, which are statistically proven to attract potential customers.
To many digital marketers, including the 1UP team, SEO is a science and an art form that combines content creation, branding, and promotion to organically lead high quality visitors to your website via search engines. The following statistics show exactly why SEO is so important:
- Google receives over 100,589 searches per second. (Internet Live Stats)
- 67% of clicks go to the first 5 results displayed in search engines. (Advanced Web Ranking)
- 90% of web pages get zero organic traffic from Google. (Databox)
- Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites. (Source: Backlinko)
- 63% of all shopping starts online, even if the transaction occurs in-store. (Source: Intergrowth)
SEO is a great investment to reach your target audience, an opportunity to nurture your business growth, and build your brand online. But how exactly will SEO help your business?
4 Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Business
1. SEO will greatly improve your website visibility
As mentioned, SEO is crucial for your website visibility. In the past, only those in specific industries with high amounts of competition may have needed SEO to see their websites take the top spot in search engine results pages (SERPs). But every industry has competition, and SEO has become necessary to reach potential customers in almost any industry.
Without SEO, your website will never gain the exposure it needs to rank highly. Unless your site is properly optimized to load quickly, target the most relevant keywords, and directly compete with others in your industry, you may find that it is extremely difficult—or altogether impossible—to increase your sales online without investing in other marketing tactics.
A Digital Marketing Agency (and its organic SEO services) can help you implement the methods that are crucial for improving your visibility in searches and increasing your chances of reaching potential customers or leads while reducing the amount of money you need to spend on marketing.
2. SEO is proven to increase brand awareness
The importance of SEO for your business is that it allows potential leads or buyers to see you, become aware of you, and then engage in the buyers cycle. How will potential customers on a search engine find your business if your site doesn’t show up?
While you may know the basics of SEO, you may not have much experience in actually optimizing your website. Or you may be learning SEO as you go, trying different tactics on your site to see what works. Does this sound familiar?
The success of your business shouldn’t be based on experiments or guesswork. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s possible for SEO to damage your site ranking rather than help it. For example, link building can certainly help your authority, but the wrong kind of links can result in your site being penalized—and even removed from search engine results.
Many SEO companies have the knowledge and necessary experience to make smart decisions for your site to increase your ranking and visibility. They also typically have experience working with a variety of clients in different industries, allowing them to appropriately handle your unique ranking situation, needs, and expectations.
When partnering with a data-driven agency, like 1UP Digital Marketing, we tailor an SEO strategy for your business needs and also ensures you’ll know how to handle unexpected changes, like algorithm updates. Qualified agencies have experienced these many times before, and can guide you through each potential issue smoothly and quickly.
3. Delegating your SEO to a qualified business partner lets you focus on what you do best
You may be wondering where you’re going to find the time to optimize your website, write new content, and build links. You may also be concerned that you aren’t knowledgeable enough to handle these tasks, or that you won’t be able to accomplish them quickly enough to make a sufficient difference in your site’s visibility that brings tangible positive results.
If you work with a professional SEO agency, you’ll be able to focus on doing what you do best—running your business—while we take care of the rest. You’ll also be less stressed about how your website is performing in search because you’ll have the knowledge that a group of professionals is handling it for you.
4. SEO improves user experience leading to increased ROI
Over the last few years, user experience (UX for short) has become a major ranking factor for Google. Therefore, SEO experts have gained higher interest in UX.
Now, SEO and UX go hand-in-hand when it comes to creating a high-ranking website. That’s why nowadays, high-ranking websites follow SEO best practices in combination with an intuitive UX design. Appealing UX design bundled with a strong SEO strategy is a guaranteed approach to improve engagement, site traffic and, eventually, rankings.
When talking about “user experience” within the context of the web, we define as a great user experience as one that:
- gives users a satisfying answer to their question.
- does this incredibly fast…
- through a site that’s easy to use on any device.
To implement a successful SEO strategy to match user search intent, we have drawn up a framework to classify these intents. There are four different types of search intents that can be categorized as follows:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Commercial
- Transactional
Note that a framework like this is never finished, and is not meant to be exhausting. It’s meant to help in understanding search intent and the different ways visitors search.
Because SEO is a long-term investment, it gains more value over time. Remember, that a longer time frame will not help if the long-term SEO strategy is poorly developed or is low-quality content. SEO ROI is more significant over time only when a website’s content is nurtured and improved inside the frame of the SEO strategy structured for it. Once website content gains traction in the SERP, it becomes easier to rank for higher traffic and higher value keywords, which equals more business and revenue.
Now you might be wondering how much traffic is SEO responsible for generating? By the end of the decade Google had accrued over 90% of the total search market with approximately 5.7 billion searches per day! These numbers are why so many businesses see the value in trying to net part of that traffic.
What now?
Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of SEO for your business, you may still have some questions left unanswered. No sweat! Get in touch to see how we can tailor a plan to your digital marketing needs. According to Clutch, 1UP is one of the top SEO firms in Canada So feel free to call us at 1.844.2-1UP-SEM (1.844.218.7736) or contact us by filling out this form: