What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO. As a business owner, you will have certainly heard those three letters thrown around plenty of times over the past few years. You may already be implementing it within your small business, but you’re not up to date with the latest SEO developments that are leaving you stranded among the competition.
If that’s you and your small business, this post will give you some of the foundational knowledge about SEO and how it can be used to enhance the visibility of your business over time.
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is what businesses use to increase the quality and volume of traffic towards their websites. This also brings much needed exposure to the brand through non-paid (organic) search engine results.
Many small businesses or start-ups will understand the importance of exposure and advertising to potential clients. SEO is as much about the people using them as it is about the search engines themselves. Understanding SEO means understanding what audiences are searching for online; the questions they are asking, what search terms they are using, and the type of content they are looking for.
By gaining an insight into these areas, you will be able to gain a connection with those who are searching online for your product or service as a solution to their problem.
Establishing audience intent is just one side of the coin, however- it’s the delivery of the results in a way that searchers understand is the other. To be successful, you will need to learn how to do both.
Why is SEO so important?
Paid advertising, social media and other online platforms can be used to generate traffic to websites- however, the majority of this traffic is still driven by the search engine.
These organic results are likely to appear to be more credible to savvy searchers and receive more clicks than on paid advertisements. In the US, only around 2.8% of searchers will click on results brought to the SERP through paid advertisements. SEO will have roughly 20 times more traffic than Pay-Per-Click (PPC) on mobile and desktop.
If set up correctly, SEO is one of the only marketing channels that will continue to work overtime. Providing your business will provide decent content that formulates a high ranking using the correct keywords, traffic to your business website will increase overtime. Whereas paid ads require a whole lot of funding over time to send traffic your way.
It is becoming clearer over time that our search engines are becoming smarter as they continue to learn searcher behaviour. However, they still need help to provide the right results from the user. Optimization of your site will help to deliver the correct information to your site so that the content provided can be displayed properly within the results.
Business owners need to be aware of the importance of SEO as part of their online marketing as well as working to keep on top of the latest trends and newer developments that are always evolving.
