If you are a business operating in the online environment, there is no chance that you are unaware of the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO can be a brilliant tool to increase the search ability and visibility of your business. Still, the impact it can have on the performance of your business is far more than that. Before we delve into the specifics of how SEO can be helpful to your business, let’s get a general idea of what it is and how it works.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is a set of complex techniques aimed at aligning your website with different guidelines and best practices laid out by experts to make sure that it ranks good on the search engine results page. Simply put, SEO is the process of making your website appear in the initial few results when a related query is passed on to Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other similar search engines.
Top 5 Benefits of SEO in 2021
Search engines such as Google process more than 40 thousand search queries every second, which translates to around 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year across the globe. Out of these 3.5 billion searches, more than 50% have a commercial intent, which means that these queries are from people looking to purchase certain products or services. Numbers this large are reason enough to invest in SEO and strengthen your presence on Google – otherwise, you’re losing out on something you can’t even imagine.
The online eCommerce environment has changed significantly over the past few years. However, SEO remains an effective and essential marketing tool to cut out of the competition and strengthen your online presence. While there can be countless benefits of a good SEO strategy, we have put together the top 5 to help you understand why SEO is so excellent.
- Building Awareness, Trust, and Credibility
Since most online buyers trust Google for answers to most of their problems, it is only natural that they trust it with their commercial needs. Therefore, websites ranking better are trusted by more users. Besides, SEO helps build a solid foundation for a clean, effective, and user-friendly website that adds to a credible brand image.
Additionally, SEO involves creating many quality backlinks, optimized on-site content, and a positive user experience on the website. This naturally increases the website’s credibility, and more people start putting their trust in such a website.
- Increase in Quality of Traffic, Engagements, and Conversions
We have already discussed the kind of numbers involved with online searches and queries with transactional intent. If you’re in the top positions in Google search results, you will receive a majority of impressions and leads. Higher impressions naturally mean higher clicks and consequently higher engagement and conversion rates.
One thing that is very important here is how you handle those visitors once they land on your website, such that most of them do convert, and you end up with a good ROI. This can be done by using optimized tags and descriptions for your website so that most people who do get the impression end up clicking on it. And once they are in there, they end up converting.
Another thing that needs to be discussed is the quality of traffic that drastically improves with good SEO. Since you optimize your website for the most relevant keywords that are neither too competitive yet have high traffic, the leads you get are better in quality. If you are correctly optimizing with the user search intent in mind, there is no way you can get a single irrelevant lead.
- Cost-Effective Technique
SEO can be beneficial for businesses that are relatively new or do not have a lot of budgets to put into online advertising. SEO is a cheaper and more effective alternative to paid advertising on Google. The rates Google can charge in its PPC bidding can go sky high for specific keywords, yet optimizing your website always costs the same. All you have to do is hire a good SEO expert and make minor changes in how your website is designed and how you operate.
SEO will get you relevant traffic, with higher chances of converting, without any paid advertising. You’ll be able to cut through the competition and rank among the top-most results on an SERP. The money you save here can be spent on other essential business tasks, which will consequently add up to improve your market position even more.
- Long Term Strategy
While search engine ads can be a temporary solution to getting more traffic to your website, SEO efforts last for a long time if they are maintained and updated correctly. The minute you pull your money out of Google ads, your paid rankings go away. With SEO, however, all you have to do is keep an eye on the latest SEO trends and keep making minor tweaks to adjust to those trends. This way, you will always be compliant with the Google ranking algorithm, and your organic rank will last for a long time without you having to pay for it constantly.
- Local SEO
Most marketers think that SEO is required only for businesses operating in the online environment. However, this is not the case. SEO can be a brilliant tool to optimize your website for local audiences even if you operate offline. Optimizing for searches with a local intent helps you rank for queries where people are looking for businesses near them or in their localities. In most cases, these users search for solutions online and then go offline to access them.
If you’re still confused about this, consider a user in LA looking for a shoe store to purchase a pair of shoes. He’ll be searching for “best show store in LA” on Google and then physically going to the store to make the purchase. In such a case, if you have optimized for this particular keyword, you’ll be the store he ends up visiting.
