SEO is short for search engine optimization. In the world of digital marketing, this marketing strategy plays an important role in helping you increase your reach to potential customers.
While, Google doesn’t share its overall search volume, it’s safe to say it’s a lot. Some a have estimated it at 3.5 billion searches per day and the volume of searches grows by 10% every year. We’re also aware that Google has the largest market share at 92%, compared to Bing or Yahoo! Knowing all this, it’s clear that SEO is a no-brainer to meet your customers where they’re searching and spending time.
So, what does this mean for your business? It means search engines are a prime place to advertise your businesses products or services. Having SEO as a key part of your digital marketing arsenal is crucial to help search engines find, crawl and index your website into their catalogue.
What is the role of SEO in a company?
The role of SEO to increase exposure of your company to potential customers on search engines. A person who is responsible for your company’s SEO efforts will analyze and implement different website strategies in order to improve your ranking for certain topics or keywords.
When customers are searching for specific services online through Google or other search engines, you want to ensure that your company is listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs), so that they can find you.
If you’re on page 70 of the SERPs, then a potential customer likely won’t be able to find your company and click through to your website.
For example, Kara wants to find a car insurance quote, so she types this into Google. If your insurance company is not on the first or second page of SERPs then she won’t find you. She will likely click on one of the top-ranking companies, browse their options and purchase an insurance policy from them.
That’s why it’s important for your company to invest in SEO, so that more customers can find you and get in touch. This will help to increase sales for your business, because if they can’t find you, they can’t purchase from you.
What are the benefits of SEO?
The benefits of SEO are plentiful. Since Google ranks sites that provide the best content to users, a lot of tactics and strategies that improve SEO, also makes your website a more effective place for users.
Establish brand awareness
When you focus on SEO efforts, you get more visitor traffic to your website. This increases your brand awareness, to encourage more people to purchase your products/services.
Improves website user experience
Google has announced that the user experience of your website, will help you rank higher by search engines. They want their users to discover high-quality content, so they give priority to sites that create content and web pages with this goal in mind.
Increase sales through inbound leads
People are already searching for that product/service on search engines when they find you. They are the ones who discover you which means you have less work to do to close the sale. Unlike outbound sales, which requires calling, emailing, etc.
Makes your website mobile-friendly
Google shared that you should focus on the user experience of those that visit your website through their mobile device. If the experience on a mobile device is poor for visitors, they will be less likely to stay on your website to explore more content.
Increases website speed time
The page load speed of your website helps users see your content faster. If the page loads slowly then a user is more likely to bounce from that page without seeing the content. SEO makes you prioritize page load speed, to ensure it’s faster.
How many types of SEO are there?
There are three types of SEO that you should implement in order to give your website the best chance of improving its position on the SERPs. These types include:
On-page SEO- This involves keyword research and using keywords in high-quality content on different webpages on your site.
Off-page SEO- Helps to strengthen the relationship your website has with other websites. This particularly focuses on building backlinks, which are getting a large number of websites to link back to your website.
Technical SEO- This involves things like site speed, indexing, crawlability, mobile friendliness, site architecture, structured data, security.
What are SEO tools?
There are plenty of paid tools that you can use to do SEO analysis and inform your strategy implementation such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs and more. However, there are also some free tools that you can use to aid your SEO strategy as well:
- Google Search Console – a suite of tools to monitor number of indexed pages, security issues, and more to help you rank your pages better.
- Google Keyword Planner - to find keywords to target in your website content and rank for the keyword topics, use this tool.
If you work with SEP, then you’ll be able to take advantage of the proprietary software that our company created to help you rank better on all of the search engines.
There’s no denying, how important SEO is in your digital marketing strategy. Helping your potential customers to discover your product/services will increase sales and profits. Your business cannot afford to not be online and can benefit immensely from a solid SEO plan.
Now that you know why SEO is critical to your marketing strategy, get in touch to drive more visitors to your website from Google and other search engines.