Let's find out what and how SEO benefits your business today.
You probably heard a lot about SEO (abbreviation for "Search Engine Optimization"). It's something like preempt the ranking for your website on SERP (abbreviation for "Search Engine Result Pages"). In short, by applying SEO on your website, it surely improve your website's overall visibility and ranking on SERP to searchers. And you might curious about what is the real SEO benefits behind.
SEO isn't new online marketing technique to marketers. But it's still an efficient, measurable, and essential way. To build and elevate the exposure of your brands and businesses online presence.
So, how SEO brings high quality and intention traffic to your website?
How SEO benefits be useful and impact to your businesses?
The high quality and intention traffic comes from users who eager to take actions. This group of users are ready to face and solve their problems or needs. They are actively surveying from internet about products and solutions for their needs.
Imagine that your website is ranked and appeared at position #1 of the first search result page. As these group had clicked on and visited your website. And they are checking for your products and solutions which able to save them from suffering problems. This kind of traffic is effort from Inbound Marketing Strategy. And you definitely don't want to miss this kind of traffic which prone to have transactions with your businesses.
Here's why : -
Outbound marketing strategy is more towards traditional way of marketing. In which consists of cold calling, cold emails, and interruptive ads. All these are marketer centric, and most of the time, it is annoying consumers. Rather than being absorbed and attend with. In short, consumers don't like to be interrupted or annoyed. The products and solutions you provided might solve their problems. But not while they are not ready to deal it with you.
On the other hand, inbound marketing strategy (including SEO and blogging) is more on consumer centric. It avoids interruption on consumers. Yet, it appears and attends to them with right content, about your products & solutions on the right time.
By comparing outbound and inbound marketing, the latter one definitely with much higher success rate on transactions with your businesses. The moment consumers started to study and research from internet. And looking for solutions to cope with their troubles or problems. That's one step away for them to make the purchase.
It's the hint that consumers are ready to be helped out, with your products and services which relevant to their problems and needs. You would be glad that you invested and applied SEO for your business website by then. High intent traffic flows into the website, and your business will gain more customers from it.
Technologies made our life easier and convenient today. People make a lot of searches via search engines on daily basis. Some for their work, businesses, locations, hobbies, even some trivia stuff to find the answer from the Internet. People trust and love effective search results which search engines striving for.
Which is one of the reasons business owners and marketers are working so hard to preempt their website ranking on SERP first page. Meanwhile, SERP is the arena where it provides absolute equality for all businesses to compete with, regardless of businesses and organizations scale.
SEO is a long term marketing and investment for a business. With consistent and adequate effort your SEO marketer putting into. Along with adaptation and adherence for search engines ranking algorithm changes. It turns your business website into high quality lead generation platform.
Proper SEO not only helps on your website ranking on SERP, but it indirectly encourages consumers to leave reviews for your businesses, in which can be found on Google search result page. Given if you had set up for your business on Google My Business and it reflected on Google search result page. What is Google My Business and benefits to your business?
Blogging or relevant and useful content writing throughout the SEO workflow, which bring another form of SEO benefits. It attracts consumers to share them among their friends and families via various social media platforms. In which the benefits of those information shared with not only elevate your website ranking on SERP. But earning reputation and build up strong public relationship and trust between your brands and consumers.
One of the best things we got with digital / internet marketing is that you can measure and understand your ROI on SEO. We can do that by setting up proper tracking and analytic tools onto website which applied for SEO. This is similar with paid ads campaign, in which we can track various of data from and then analyze for further optimization.
We can track targeted keywords ranking / position on SERP from time to time, goals achieved such as CTA (call to actions like clicks on WhatsApp button, email address link and etc.), performance of your website, such as what kind of keyword queries which brought visitors land on the website, if any errors found by search engines and etc. All these will be useful for both SEO marketers and business owners, so that they can analyze and understand about their SEO progress and performance.
Unlike conventional marketing like radio broadcasting, it is hardly tell you about the performance. And it is not accurate as SEO do. In which traditional marketing are more on outbound marketing. In contrast, business owners can always refer back to those keyword ranking reports which prepared periodically by SEO marketers. Some even come with dashboard which can be viewed based on desired time frame(of the optimization period) for different data like goals achieved, traffic source, and etc.
SEO is a long term investment for businesses, in needs for adaptation of search engines ranking algorithm and continuous audit, monitoring, and optimization. Unlike Paid Ads, which incurred higher CPC (Cost Per Click), and will only takes effect as long as the advertisement budget flowing into the account. SEO will be affected by factors like competition within the business industry, targeted keywords, quantity & quality of link building and etc. Yet, it doesn't comes with CPC, and the overall monetary cost involved is far more lower than Paid Ads. This is definitely preferred SEO benefits for business owners.
During the process of bidding for keywords or placements for Paid Ads, the pricing will be affected by some factors like competition and popularity of the keywords. Popular keywords which will bring higher traffic for Paid Ads which normally accompanied with higher CPC.
A good SEO scheme (non Black Hat technique) will bring organic traffic to the website, and the result achieved generally will be less fluctuate. The changes of the SEO overall performance normally contributed by change of search engines ranking algorithm and competitions from others website SEO efforts.
Paid Ads normally suitable for shorter promotion period for products and services, which doesn't need to be always active. In general, SEO is relatively reliable and worth for business marketing investment, which bringing stable and long term organic and high intention traffic flow into targeted website.
By the time of writing this article, 52% of global internet traffic comes from mobile phones. As wider coverage of network connection and penetration of smartphone, users had adapted and prone to do frequent searches while on the move. On March 2020, Google had announced switch to mobile-first indexing for all websites start on September 2020. To adapt in both mobile indexing first and gain website organic traffic from travelers who search online, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly / responsive website design. So that your website is capable of display your website layout seamlessly across mobile devices(e.g.: smartphones and tablets) and computers (e.g.: desktop and laptop).
There has been a 900% increase in searches that contain "___ near me today/tonight" over the last two years. (Source from: Think with Google, 2018). 82 percent of smartphone shoppers conduct "near me" searches. (Source from: Search Engine Land, 2018).
Up to this point, SEO not only facilitates organic traffic towards your website(s). It also attract and bring more consumers visit your physical shops or outlets at the time.
There are at least 3.5 billion of searches processed by Google everyday, it is wise and strategic to invest on SEO and elevate your business website's ranking on first page of SERP. So that it is accessible by consumers easily at anytime they search for products or services relevant to your businesses. We believe that you will have better understanding on SEO benefits after this reading.