If you have begun researching digital marketing strategies for your business, odds are, SEO, or search engine optimization, has shown up multiple times as a must-have marketing technique to help encourage more people to visit your website. With benefits such as cost-effectiveness and higher ROIs, SEO is without a doubt one of the most important digital marketing strategies that your business should implement if you are planning to grow.
Want to learn about SEO and its benefits for your business? Keep ready to learn more!
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is an umbrella term that refers to a larger number of strategies that are aimed at getting your website to rank higher on search engines. In essence, you are trying to make your business more visible online so that people can find your business when searching for topics, products, or services that they want. With greater website visibility, you can create a better user experience that encourages more people to visit your website.
Businesses that are able to rank higher online (as well as a few other SEO factors) are typically able to draw a greater number of visitors, and therefore, a wider potential customer base. In order to start seeing the results of your SEO efforts, you need to make sure your website is created thoughtfully and with an organized structure. Other things like website speed and mobile-friendliness are factors that contribute to your website’s visibility and performance.
SEO is a long-term strategy that requires maintenance and upkeep in order for you to see improved results. It is important that you understand how SEO works before you dive in as this is a strategy that can take a longer amount of time to optimize in comparison to other marketing methods, such as PPC advertising
Why is SEO Important??
Did you know that only 5% search traffic goes beyond page one of the search engine results page (source)? In today’s fast-paced economy, people no longer have time to browse aimlessly; they know what they want, and they want it now. Getting your website at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), let alone on the first page, is paramount to driving more people to your website.
So how do search engines like Google and Bing find your business’s website? That is where SEO comes into play. These popular search engines use web crawlers (yes, these are bots) to browse through the internet and index all pages for quality. This includes content that matches your website’s subject matter as well as backlinks (or inbound links) which give your business more credibility (for example, if a government-owned website links to your website on theirs, it gives your website a higher ranking). Indexing does take some time, and that is one of the reasons why SEO marketing takes more time than other marketing initiatives – but it is well worth the wait! High-ranking pages help increase your website’s odds of appearing higher on the SERP.
.
The Benefits of SEO for Your Business
1.SEO is budget-friendly
While other forms of advertising like Paid Search, print, or influencer marketing require ad dollars in addition to the cost of the service, SEO is fairly inexpensive because you are not paying the search engine companies anything. And depending on your needs, you can actually do quite a lot of SEO on your own (although, we HIGHLY recommend hiring an SEO team or SEO specialist to truly relish the benefits of SEO for your business).
One of the best examples of inexpensive SEO techniques is blog writing. If you are the expert that you say you are, and you can write a decent article on your subject matter, blogging is a great way to build content for your website.
2. Improve your business’s brand awareness with SEO
Part of your SEO strategy will be to rank highly for your branded keywords (example: Nike would not appreciate another sports shoe company showing up organically at the top of the SERP for a keyword like “new Nike sneakers”). And another important component of how SEO can increase your business’s brand awareness is by using unbranded keywords which can increase your website’s traffic! How would that work?
For example, the average parent trying to find an Italian restaurant near them would search for “Italian restaurant near me”. If your restaurant’s website is optimized for this keyword and location, it could rank higher and show up at the top of this person’s search results. In this part of this user’s journey, they may feel enticed to click on your website and learn more about your business. This could lead to them following your social accounts for future updates, and it could even lead them to call and put in an order for pick up!
No matter what exactly happens in this person’s journey, SEO was a part of it.
3. Encourage growth in your business’s other marketing endeavors with SEO
As mentioned above, SEO is often responsible for at least some of the user’s journey, and because of this, it helps most of your other digital marketing campaigns. The ability to see which keywords are performing well organically (organically means for free – not an ad), could potentially help you save thousands of dollars in PPC advertising. Tracking which web pages have the most conversions or visits could help you learn which products are performing best online. If you really want to get into details, you can even track desktop versus mobile performance!
And this leads us to our next point…
You can track and measure your business’s SEO performance
With a thorough understanding and implementation of Google Analytics and Search Console for your business’s website, you can truly reap the benefits of SEO.
Set up conversions (goals) that align with your business’s higher-level goals. Let’s say that you are launching a new summer product line, and you are trying to test to locate where in the customer’s journey the most website bounces occur (“bounces”, often measured by “bounce rate” is the number of times a user exits the page or website). By setting up these goals and recording this data, SEO can help you locate these bounces and determine or hypothesize why they are occurring.
One of the most important benefits of SEO for your business is the ability to track your website’s health and make improvements moving forward. Did you know that the average user leaves a website if a site load speed is over three seconds?
SEO can help your business keep up with PR
Like SEO, public relations contributes to most of your digital marketing initiatives, and with SEO, you can help improve your PR efforts. Keeping track of your company’s reputation can be a challenge, especially during growth phases. By tracking and measuring your SEO efforts, you can learn more about how people are coming to your website as well as trending keywords that are associated with your business (both the good and the bad).
SEO can help your business increase its customers!
Our favorite (and most important) benefit of SEO for your business is that it can increase your customers! It is really quite simple; if someone is able to find your website by searching for either a branded or unbranded keyword, they have just begun one of the first steps of becoming a potential (or returning) customer or lead. With almost 50% of marketers crediting SEO as providing the highest ROI, it is a marketing strategy that you should not ignore when trying to increase your customer base (source).
In conclusion, SEO is one of the most beneficial digital marketing strategies today. With the majority of the world using search engines to solve their problems, increasing your visibility online is necessary to help your business grow.
Looking to build a new website or optimize an existing one? SEO should be at the top of your priority list. Want to learn how Hudson Digital Group can help your business grow with SEO marketing? Contact us today!
If you have begun researching digital marketing strategies for your business, odds are, SEO, or search engine optimization, has shown up multiple times as a must-have marketing technique to help encourage more people to visit your website. With benefits such as cost-effectiveness and higher ROIs, SEO is without a doubt one of the most important digital marketing strategies that your business should implement if you are planning to grow.
Want to learn about SEO and its benefits for your business? Keep ready to learn more!
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is an umbrella term that refers to a larger number of strategies that are aimed at getting your website to rank higher on search engines. In essence, you are trying to make your business more visible online so that people can find your business when searching for topics, products, or services that they want. With greater website visibility, you can create a better user experience that encourages more people to visit your website.
Businesses that are able to rank higher online (as well as a few other SEO factors) are typically able to draw a greater number of visitors, and therefore, a wider potential customer base. In order to start seeing the results of your SEO efforts, you need to make sure your website is created thoughtfully and with an organized structure. Other things like website speed and mobile-friendliness are factors that contribute to your website’s visibility and performance.
SEO is a long-term strategy that requires maintenance and upkeep in order for you to see improved results. It is important that you understand how SEO works before you dive in as this is a strategy that can take a longer amount of time to optimize in comparison to other marketing methods, such as PPC advertising
Why is SEO Important??
Did you know that only 5% search traffic goes beyond page one of the search engine results page (source)? In today’s fast-paced economy, people no longer have time to browse aimlessly; they know what they want, and they want it now. Getting your website at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), let alone on the first page, is paramount to driving more people to your website.
So how do search engines like Google and Bing find your business’s website? That is where SEO comes into play. These popular search engines use web crawlers (yes, these are bots) to browse through the internet and index all pages for quality. This includes content that matches your website’s subject matter as well as backlinks (or inbound links) which give your business more credibility (for example, if a government-owned website links to your website on theirs, it gives your website a higher ranking). Indexing does take some time, and that is one of the reasons why SEO marketing takes more time than other marketing initiatives – but it is well worth the wait! High-ranking pages help increase your website’s odds of appearing higher on the SERP.
.
The Benefits of SEO for Your Business
1.SEO is budget-friendly
While other forms of advertising like Paid Search, print, or influencer marketing require ad dollars in addition to the cost of the service, SEO is fairly inexpensive because you are not paying the search engine companies anything. And depending on your needs, you can actually do quite a lot of SEO on your own (although, we HIGHLY recommend hiring an SEO team or SEO specialist to truly relish the benefits of SEO for your business).
One of the best examples of inexpensive SEO techniques is blog writing. If you are the expert that you say you are, and you can write a decent article on your subject matter, blogging is a great way to build content for your website.
2. Improve your business’s brand awareness with SEO
Part of your SEO strategy will be to rank highly for your branded keywords (example: Nike would not appreciate another sports shoe company showing up organically at the top of the SERP for a keyword like “new Nike sneakers”). And another important component of how SEO can increase your business’s brand awareness is by using unbranded keywords which can increase your website’s traffic! How would that work?
For example, the average parent trying to find an Italian restaurant near them would search for “Italian restaurant near me”. If your restaurant’s website is optimized for this keyword and location, it could rank higher and show up at the top of this person’s search results. In this part of this user’s journey, they may feel enticed to click on your website and learn more about your business. This could lead to them following your social accounts for future updates, and it could even lead them to call and put in an order for pick up!
No matter what exactly happens in this person’s journey, SEO was a part of it.
3. Encourage growth in your business’s other marketing endeavors with SEO
As mentioned above, SEO is often responsible for at least some of the user’s journey, and because of this, it helps most of your other digital marketing campaigns. The ability to see which keywords are performing well organically (organically means for free – not an ad), could potentially help you save thousands of dollars in PPC advertising. Tracking which web pages have the most conversions or visits could help you learn which products are performing best online. If you really want to get into details, you can even track desktop versus mobile performance!
And this leads us to our next point…
You can track and measure your business’s SEO performance
With a thorough understanding and implementation of Google Analytics and Search Console for your business’s website, you can truly reap the benefits of SEO.
Set up conversions (goals) that align with your business’s higher-level goals. Let’s say that you are launching a new summer product line, and you are trying to test to locate where in the customer’s journey the most website bounces occur (“bounces”, often measured by “bounce rate” is the number of times a user exits the page or website). By setting up these goals and recording this data, SEO can help you locate these bounces and determine or hypothesize why they are occurring.
One of the most important benefits of SEO for your business is the ability to track your website’s health and make improvements moving forward. Did you know that the average user leaves a website if a site load speed is over three seconds?
SEO can help your business keep up with PR
Like SEO, public relations contributes to most of your digital marketing initiatives, and with SEO, you can help improve your PR efforts. Keeping track of your company’s reputation can be a challenge, especially during growth phases. By tracking and measuring your SEO efforts, you can learn more about how people are coming to your website as well as trending keywords that are associated with your business (both the good and the bad).
SEO can help your business increase its customers!
Our favorite (and most important) benefit of SEO for your business is that it can increase your customers! It is really quite simple; if someone is able to find your website by searching for either a branded or unbranded keyword, they have just begun one of the first steps of becoming a potential (or returning) customer or lead. With almost 50% of marketers crediting SEO as providing the highest ROI, it is a marketing strategy that you should not ignore when trying to increase your customer base (source).
In conclusion, SEO is one of the most beneficial digital marketing strategies today. With the majority of the world using search engines to solve their problems, increasing your visibility online is necessary to help your business grow.
Looking to build a new website or optimize an existing one? SEO should be at the top of your priority list. Want to learn how Hudson Digital Group can help your business grow with SEO marketing? Contact us today!
