What is SEO? Importance and Marketing Strategies
SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. Check out the SEO tools you can use for optimal ranking.
It’s also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. So, here’s everything you need to know about SEO and why it’s vital to succeed in today’s digital world.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant, and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.
Search engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit both the user search experience and the page’s ranking, by featuring content that fulfills user search needs. This includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the page’s content meaning, among other SEO best practices.
Search engines help people find what they’re looking for online. Whether researching a product, looking for a restaurant, or booking a vacation, search engines are a common starting point when you need information. Business owners offer a valuable opportunity to direct relevant traffic to your website.
The Benefits Of SEO
Search engine optimization is a key part of online marketing because search is one of the primary ways that users navigate the web.
Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic the site will tend to receive. For example, for a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query, with the number two and three results receiving significantly less traffic. Only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first page of search results. Thus, even a small improvement in search engine rankings can result in a website receiving more traffic and potential business.
Because of this, many businesses and website owners will try to manipulate the search results so that their site shows up higher on the search results page (SERP) than their competitors. This is where SEO comes in.
Why Is SEO Important?
SEO is important for brands as it’s a highly effective way to improve your brand’s visibility through the search, drive more traffic to your website, establish your brand as a trusted authority in your industry, sustainably and reliably grow your business, and much more. Here’s how each of these factors contributes to the importance of SEO for your brand.
1. Visibility and Rankings
Primarily, SEO is important because it increases organic web traffic. Anything that is unpaid on the internet (organic traffic), especially user flow towards a web page, is considered to be organic.
When content gets optimized through keywords that help in organizing the content, the search engines like Google and Yahoo direct their users towards such web pages where information related to their search exists. This increases web traffic in terms of quality and quantity and so, users prefer to open websites that are more SEO-friendly.
2. Visibility and Rankings
One of the most important functions of SEO is increasing visibility, which means making it easier for prospects to find you when they search for something you have to offer. Visibility is directly related to your ranking.
The higher you rank on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely prospects will see you and click through to your site, so it’s key to increasing your organic page ranking. The more effective your SEO efforts, the higher your ranking and the better your visibility, which is especially important when you consider that a quarter of web users never click past the first SERP.
3. User Experience
A well-optimized website clearly communicates what product or service is being offered, shows how to obtain it, and answers any questions surrounding it. User experience is a major ranking factor for Google. This means that by catering the site to appeal to search engines like Google and Bing, you’re also catering it to the user’s experience. This means both search engines and users are able to easily get the information they need. On the other hand, if a user struggles to navigate your site, chances are that search engines will as well.
4. Authority
Page Authority (PA) is increasingly important to search engines as it’s becoming more important to web users. Essentially, authority means that your website is trustworthy, high quality, relevant, and has something to offer.
Scores range from 1 to 100 and the higher your number, the more authority your site has. You can find your PA rating by using tools such as Moz and while it’s difficult to influence it, many SEO experts believe it’s to do with link profile – getting external links from credible and well-visited sources.
5. Growth
There’s no doubt about it—SEO carries a lot of importance for the growth of your brand. As we mentioned above, the higher you rank on a search engine for a variety of high-volume keywords, the more organic (aka non-paid) web traffic your site will receive. It’s as simple as that.
A website that is well-optimized is more likely to gain more customers and make more sales. People are also more likely to then share your brand across other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram once they’ve found your website through a search engine.
10 Best Benefits Of SEO (search engine optimization)
6. Web Traffic
Increased web traffic is one of the main goals of SEO, and you increase traffic when you increase visibility and rankings. Consider this for a moment: the #1 spot on a Google search gets nearly 32% of clicks and moving up just one spot in search results can increase CTR by an amazing 30.8%.
The golden grail for many marketers is the ‘Featured Snippet’ which is often referred to as position #0 as it appears above the first ranked URL. This is usually content that’s taken from a landing page on a blog that answers a question people are searching for and can give your organic click-through a huge boost.
