If you Google a product you sell online, is your brand among the first few that appear in your search results? If you shook your head in a no, your brand is miles behind its competition.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about highlighting your brand in people’s search engine results. But why is this important? Can’t your digital marketing strategy survive without it? Read on to find out your answers and much more about SEO!
Why SEO Completes Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Increases Visibility
You might be a small business, but the internet will throw plenty of competition your way. And if you want to get noticed, you need to rise above even your strongest competitors. That’s where SEO can make a difference.
A good SEO strategy warrants a higher SERP ranking. As you start appearing easily in people’s search results, your website and brand gets noticed quickly and stand out. Without optimal SEO, your website would be lost in the crowd.
In fact, most people don’t look beyond the first few websites on Google’s search results page, and unless you are one of those few, be ready to be ignored.
Builds Customer Trust
When the market turns gloomy, a customer’s trust can revive your brand. Generally, too, becoming a trustworthy brand always benefits you, and SEO can help you achieve this trust.
A well-designed SEO strategy consisting of the right backlinks and reflecting excellent user behavior can make your brand authoritative. This won’t be easy. Still, once your brand gains authority and credibility online, your customers will put their trust in you, and your reputation will become better automatically.
Nurture the Buyer
Shopping online isn’t limited to retail giants like Amazon and eBay. No matter what service or product a buyer wants, they will search online. However, this search won’t always be the name of the product they are looking for. Sometimes, they might type in their problem, a long-phrase describing their desired product or something vaguely related to it.
Your website can get noticed with a winning SEO strategy even when the buyer searches vaguely for the service or product. The right keywords can attract leads to your site even when they aren’t directly searching for your service or product. And suppose you can generate SEO content to appear on every stage of a buyer’s journey as it progresses. In that case, you will push them to convert quicker. Well-optimized content can let you nurture your leads as they decide what to buy and where.
Brings More and Better Traffic
According to the BrightEdge Organic Channel report, about 53% of all traffic that comes to websites does so through organic search. This clearly indicates that without a credible SERP presence, your website will miss out on this massive chunk of traffic.
If your website is excellently optimized and ranked higher in the SERP, you will automatically see not only more but also good-quality traffic. This is because the organic traffic that your site attracts is coming to you on their own, without you having to pull them in.
Collects Leads from Other Channels
Your brand recently designed a unique social media campaign that everyone is talking about. Yet, you don’t seem to get a lot of website visitors willing to buy your product or subscribe to you. Is it a fault in your social media strategy that’s letting this happen? Probably not.
Even if you created a buzz around your products with excellent social media, email, or other forms of marketing, your users will search for your brand or products on Google instead of directly typing in your brand’s URL most of the time.
In fact, they might not even click on social media links and opt to search for your brand on Google just to see if it’s legitimate. If you don’t have a well-managed SEO plan, you won’t appear in these search results and won’t collect the leads that you generated through other channels. This would be a waste of your money and effort.
SEO isn’t just limited to the organic traffic that comes your way. Find a way to integrate other marketing channels in your SEO strategy, and you’ll see far better conversion rates.
Drives Local Traffic
For small and medium-sized businesses, local leads are gems that cannot be forgotten. The local buzz around a small business’ products is what keeps it going. But in an age where people search online even for local shops, restaurants, and other services, it’s impossible to create even local engagement without good SEO techniques.
From your Google My Business listing to geo-specific keywords and local backlinks, all contribute to building your brand’s reputation in a small and concentrated region. This further promotes customer engagement and ultimately attracts leads to your business both online and offline. In this manner, SEO drives customers to you even outside of the internet.
Conclusion
Having learned all about how SEO is vital for your business’s growth, it’s time you start your website’s optimization process soon. If you aren’t familiar with Google’s algorithms, hire experts instead of wasting time experimenting.
Do you think SEO is relevant in other ways than those mentioned above? Comment down to let us know!