A Novices Guide to Understanding the Benefits of SEO for Businesses

You too can reap the benefits of SEO – Discover how the benefits of SEO can increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and increase sales.

It is insanely easy to launch a business these days. You don’t even need to have any capital to start one if you go the online route.

The Internet has leveled the playing field so that even the little guy has a good shot at making a success of their business.

Therein lays the conundrum.

A level playing field means an upsurge in competition from all sides.

You have to make yourself heard over every Tom, Dick, and Harry that enters the arena. That is where the benefits of SEO can help you.

Search engine optimization, simply put, is doing whatever it takes to make sure a search engine can find your site, much like publishing your phone number in the directory.

However, just like being in an old phone directory wasn’t enough, simply being in Google isn’t enough. Even with a phone book, you had to take out an ad to make sure your listing was at the top all shiny and prominent. Well, Google works the same way, you need to be on the first page and preferably in a top position to get noticed.

If you think that sounds like a lot of work, you would be right.

However, if you do it right, SEO can boost your business significantly. This is why big businesses put many resources to improving their SEO, and so should you. Before doing that, however, you should first understand what it is, and how a good SEO campaign can help you in your business.

 

SEO

SEO is the strategies and techniques used for the goal of bringing your site to the first page of different search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

The idea is to increase the right kind of traffic, i.e. target market, to your site through organic search results.

 

Quality of traffic

While having many visitors to your site may be gratifying, your real purpose for SEO is to generate sales.

You want quality visitors, a.k.a. those that are interested in your products or offerings.

To do that, you need the right kind of people to click through to your site.

If you are in the retail clothing business, people looking for a second-hand tractor are not likely to buy anything from you. They might, but the probability is not high.

Your SEO strategy should drive visitors to your site who are ready to buy your products or services.

 

Traffic volume

Presuming your SEO strategy is attracting and driving quality traffic to your site, you want as many of them to see your site in a search as possible. Add persistence into the mix for high traffic volume.

 

Organic traffic

Search term: business casual for women

Source: https://www.screencast.com/t/opfzevHfeO

The term “organic traffic” in the SEO world refers to visitors that come upon your site through natural means, such as being an exact match for a search term.

You can get more people to come to your site by using irrelevant keywords, i.e. “second-hand tractor” for a retail-clothing site, but dissatisfaction among your visitors is going to be extremely likely, so why would you do that?

 

Benefits of SEO for Business

The benefits of SEO for a business are numerous, but they don’t come easily. You need a consistent and relentless SEO strategy to make it work. If you succeed, though, you can look forward to the following benefits.

 

More traffic

The reason you want your site to be on the first page is to get as many clicks as possible.

Few people bother to go past the first three entries, and fewer still go past the first page of the search results.

SEO can help you get to the top page using the right keywords, which will naturally result in more traffic. Statistically, more traffic, more sales. Ergo, better ranking in the search engine result pages (SERP) gives you more sales.

Better UX

UX refers to the user experience.

SEO can help people find what they need in a search, so that makes your site UX-friendly right off the bat. They will not have to go through several pages on your site to find the one they want, so SEO gives your audience a shortcut to the relevant pages. This is always a good thing, considering that most people like sites that are easy to use.

Higher recall

When you see a site coming up in many of your search results, you tend to remember it, right?

SEO can give you higher recall for your brand, simply by being visible all the time. Of course, you need to rank high in different search engines, but it will pay in spades for your brand marketing when you do.

Once you do begin ranking for a solid grouping of search queries, all that hard and relentless work is going to become a LOT easier moving forward.

Cost-effectiveness

SEO is a marketing strategy, but unlike most marketing strategies, it doesn’t cost anything close to what you have to pay for a television commercial or print ads.

You can even carry out an SEO strategy yourself if you want, so that it costs close to nothing.

Well, that is except your time and effort.

However, even if you do pay for or outsource SEO services, it is still a very cost-effective way to promote and market your business, and it kills as an inbound marketing strategy. Every visitor you get (presuming it’s organic traffic) is interested in what you have to offer, so that makes them qualified and potential buyers.

24/7 action

SEO works round the clock.

Once you have a strategy in place, you don’t have to do anything else.

Any time a user searches a relevant keyword for your site and business, you have the potential to sell to them even when you aren’t online. At the very least, they can leave a message for you on your site so you can get back to them, so you grow your list of potential buyers while you sleep.

That is one of its biggest advantages over other marketing channels.

Better tracking

It’s always hard to measure whether or not you are getting a return on investment.

It’s like that for any marketing channel. In many cases, you can infer that you are getting results from your sales, but you can’t really be sure.

With SEO, however, you can immediately track how effective your campaign is by checking your search ranking, traffic volume, and conversions through SEO analytics software. You can even see what keywords your customers used to find and buy something on your site.

If you don’t get the results you want or expect, you can pinpoint exactly what you need to do to improve your results at any time. If you do get good results, you can use that strategy as a template for future ones.

You can make the most of your time and money in an SEO strategy that works without having to wait for sales that may never even come.

Takeaway

SEO is a key factor in any marketing strategy, even if you are not an online business although you have an online presence. You need people to know who you are, what you offer, and where they can find you, or you will get lost in the millions of other websites. With even a basic understanding of SEO, you can immediately see how it can help boost your business.

However, note that you cannot live on SEO alone. It can lead people to your site and the right landing pages, but that is where its role ends. You still have to make sure that your site is UX-friendly, your products and services up to standard, and your customer service excellence to succeed in business. That said, SEO is definitely a good way to get the ball rolling.