If you are a business owner you must have likely heard of SEO and its importance for the growth of your business. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of an effective online marketing campaign, but you might not be familiar with how SEO marketing works so you need to be convinced about why you should invest in SEO marketing.
In this article, I want to talk about the importance of SEO marketing, and why it is essential for you to invest in it for the growth of your business.
What exactly is SEO Marketing?
Let me explain SEO to you, I will explain it to you like a novice who is new to online marketing.
SEO is an online marketing technique of optimizing your website in order to make rank and gain visibility in search results.
SEO makes it easy for your website to become visible when your potential customers search for keywords that are related to your business, and if you feel this does not matter that means you don’t want your website to be visible to potential customers that are actively looking for you in the search engine.
As a potential customer of other businesses too, I want you to think of how you find the information you need on the search engine.
What will you do if you want to hire a lawyer and you don’t know what to do or how to go about it?
What would you do if you want to buy property but you need to get information about houses that are available in the area you want to buy from?
What will you have done if you are looking for a web developer that will redesign your website?
I am absolutely sure that what you will do is reach out to any of your smart computers and input your search phrase into the Google search engine.
You are likely to search for phrases like “best criminal lawyer in Lagos,” “how to hire the best attorney,” and “how much does it cost to hire an attorney.”
After you are done putting your search phrase on the Google home page you will click search and wait for your results.
After the search engine delivers you results to your search query, you will have to scroll through the search engine results and click through on any website that answers your search query perfectly.
Search engines deliver the best possible results that they think will be the most helpful information to online users based on their search queries or the keywords you use.
Meanwhile, you need to know that those websites that rank on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) didn’t just get there, those website owners invested in SEO marketing so that it will be easier for Google to understand what their website is all about and how it can serve online users.
The SEOs that work on those websites that appear on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) do keyword research on the keywords that their target customers are using to search for them on the search engine so they optimize the content on their website with these keywords so that their website can become visible to their potential customers on the search engine.
As a business owner, you will also need to invest in SEO marketing, if you want your website to become visible to your potential customers.
5 Core Benefits of SEO Marketing for Your Business.
Investing in SEO marketing will improve your website rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Effective SEO marketing will have a positive impact on your business's most important goals.
These goals will most likely be to increase the number of your qualified leads or to increase your sales.
If you are still in doubt about whether you need to invest in SEO marketing or not, I want you to relax and learn about the 5 core benefits of SEO marketing for your business.
1. SEO Targets Quality Online Traffic
SEO is known for generating search engine traffic from potential customers who are likely to make a purchase, and this traffic SEO generates from target customers is also known as Inbound marketing.
Let me explain further, inbound marketing is a way of attracting your potential customers to you by creating valuable content and experiences.
Inbound marketing is so much different from outbound marketing.
While Inbound marketing generates traffic through the use of valuable content, outbound marketing annoys online users with content they don’t need because instead of attracting users through valuable content they focus on reaching out to online users whether they are interested or not.
Outbound marketing strategies such as television ads, spam emails, radio ads, and cold calls focus on the goal of the advertisers and they are annoying to online users that’s why it is important to invest in SEO marketing because inbound marketing is customer-centric, it involves in providing valuable resources to online users.
Examples of Inbound marketing strategies that are helpful to online users are Blog posts, Ebooks, infographics, white papers, webinars, case studies, and many more.
Providing valuable and helpful information to your potential customers will make it easy for them to trust and purchase from you because you have proved to them that you are an authority in your niche.
When you invest in SEO marketing you will make it easy for your potential customers to find you on their own through the valuable information that you publish on your website, and it is much more convenient for them to find you on their own than for you to push ads to their face when they don’t need it.
You will acquire lots of qualified leads when you make it easy for your target customers to find you at their own convenient time.
To increase your business sales you need to focus on attracting your potential customers by providing them with the information they are looking for because SEO marketing gives your website the opportunity to become visible to your potential customers while they are actively searching for you and ready to make a purchase.
2. With the Presence of SEO marketing you won’t pay for Ads.
The best results are the ones that appear on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs), and these results are based entirely on what search engine bot determines to be the best valuable answers to any query.
What this means is that your website will continue to generate traffic on the search engine as long as it contains valuable information that is useful to online users.
This traffic can be generated for months or years after your content has been published on your website.
You don’t need to pay for ads if you are doing SEO marketing, but you need to consistently publish valuable content so that it will be easier for your target customers to locate you; meanwhile, creating valuable content that will be of interest to your potential customers requires investment.
The investment I am talking about can be in form of time, that is if you choose to create the content yourself, or the investment can be in form of money if you choose to hire an SEO professional to create it for you.
You need to know that after you have invested in your website content, you won’t need to spend any more money to attract qualified traffic to your website through the search engine.
All that will be required of you is to update your website content once in a while, and it is also necessary to improve on your content once your traffic volume starts to drop, or when your competitors are also trying to rank for the same keywords.
Your website's spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) depends on how valuable your content is to your online users, you can’t pay to earn your spot.
This is the reason why small business owners prefer to invest in SEO marketing over PPC marketing.
While search engine optimization (SEO) can earn you a search engine spot for free through your valuable and helpful content.
PPC marketing will require you to pay a certain fee each time online users visit your website.
The average cost per click (CPC) across all industries is $3.
Imagine you have to spend $3 on any online user that visits your website through a PPC campaign.
This means that getting 1000 online users to visit your website will definitely cost you $3000, without the guarantee that they will make a purchase.
With effective SEO marketing, you can avoid paying this huge amount of money to generate few traffic that does not last long.
3. SEO Generates More Website Click-through-Rate Than PPC
80% of website traffic comes from the search engine, thanks to SEO marketing.
Even though PPC ads appear above search engine rankings, people prefer to click on the website that earns the top spot through organic rankings because online users believe that search engine searches them for the best possible results, and these results are not paid for.
Online users can differentiate between ad results and organic results, because of this they are able to choose the organic results because they believe that those results are the best.
This means if you invest in SEO marketing, you will see an increase in your website visits than if you invest in PPC marketing.
4. SEO Marketing Can Also Help Your Business's PR
Although search engine marketing (SEO) and public relations (PR) are two different marketing strategies that are entirely different from each other, both marketing strategies can be mixed together to maximize your marketing results.
The most common connection between the two marketing strategies is that they both work towards the building of links.
Earning backlinks from authoritative third-party websites is an important search engine ranking factor.
Apart from creating valuable content for online users, you also need to earn links from high domain authority websites so that they can pass a vote of confidence to your website and make it trustworthy in the eye of search engines.
And while PR also focuses on getting popular influencers and publications to talk about your company, this also gives you an opportunity to earn links from third-party publications of your company.
SEO link-building tactics give you an opportunity to reach your potential customers by distributing valuable content on your business-related websites across the web.
5. You Will Outrank Your Competitors.
SEO marketing has become a necessity for any company that wants growth because it gives your company an opportunity to compete against companies that are bigger than yours, and if you play your card wisely, you will outrank bigger companies and earn more traffic than them.
Search engines level the ground for any company with great content and user experience to rank higher, this is the reason why it is necessary for you to improve your online presence through SEO if you want to outrank your competitors on search engines.
If you are yet to invest in SEO, you need to know that your competitors are already online and ranking for keywords your website would have ranked for.
But if you invest in an effective SEO strategy you can outrank them and stay competitive.