Why is SEO Important for Business?

As a business owner, you’ve probably heard hundreds of times how important search engine optimization, or SEO, is for your business. However, do you really know how it works? Even if you do have a basic understanding, you may not fully understand this complex, multifaceted process.

SEO is comprised of several elements and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why it’s so important. Basically, SEO is critical because it increases the visibility of your website, which increases traffic- meaning you have more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.

It also builds brand awareness as well as relationships with your prospects and positions you as an authoritative, trustworthy expert in your industry. In this article, we’ll explain what you need to know about SEO and why it’s the key to being successful in today’s digital world.

Elements of SEO Marketing

When it comes to SEO marketing, there are five elements you need to be aware of. We will discuss these below:

Keywords

At one time, keywords were the only SEO technique that mattered. Those days are gone, but keywords are still important. The difference is that today, they must be well-researched, carefully chosen, and thoughtfully used to be effective.

When you start researching keywords, you must look for those with high search rates and low competition. You must also make sure you’re using short-tail and long-tail keywords and use primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords in your content. you also want to use keywords in titles, URLs, and other on-page SEO elements. 

Content

Content is a critical piece of SEO because it is what you use to reach and engage with your audience. You must know what your angle is and create content that fits. For example, if you own a nursery, you might consider publishing a series of blogs on gardening. When someone searches for gardening tips, your blog will come up and when they start thinking about buying plants, yours will be the first they will think of.

Content must be educational, relevant, interesting, and sharable. It comes in a variety of forms, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Social media posts
• Listicles
• Whitepapers/e-books

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to external optimization that happens away from your site instead of on it. The primary technique for this is backlink building. When you use quality backlinks from external sites, you indicate to the search engines that your site is high quality and valuable- which builds your authority.

Some of the best ways to build backlinks are through guest blog posts, infographics that will be highly shared, and influencer marketing.

Local SEO

As mobile device searches become more common, local SEO is becoming more important. Approximately 60% of searches are done on a mobile device and almost half have local intent.

In addition to local keywords, other local SEO practices include location-specific pages for your website, claiming directory listings, and creating a business page on Google.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, also known as SEM, refers to paid marketing efforts, including native ads, social media ads, display ads, Google AdWords, PPC advertisements, Google shopping ads, and more. While SEM is not a major piece of comprehensive SEO, it does have its place to help you reach new, targeted audiences. Examples include:

• Paid/targeted ads
• Keyword-based copy relating to your business or product
• Performance-based indicators such as cost-per-click, or CPC, and click-through-rates, or CTR

Gleave Media have been very professional and yet approachable and friendly in the provision of their SEO service. Being a small business and not having high levels of IT/social media skills their guidance and work on my website has been extremely helpful with very useful monthly reports on progress.

Hazel Walker (Google 5 Star review)

Importance of SEO for Business

Below, we’ll take a closer look at the importance of SEO for business:

Visibility/Rankings

One of the primary functions of SEO is to increase the visibility of your business, which makes it easier for people to find you. Visibility is related to your ranking on the search engine results page, or SERP. The higher your ranking, the more likely you are to be seen.  

The more effective your SEO efforts, the higher your ranking will be, which means your visibility will be greater. This is critical because approximately ¼ of web users don’t click past the first SERP.

Web Traffic

Another goal of SEO is increasing web traffic and traffic is increased when your rankings and visibility are increased. Consider this: the first spot on Google search results gets 32% of the clicks and by moving up just one spot in the search results, you can increase your CTR by 30.8%.

Therefore, if you want people to find your website through a search engine, you need to engage in SEO practices that help you rank within the top 5, preferably #1.

Page Authority

Page authority is becoming more important to search engines because it’s becoming more important to web users. Basically, this means that your site is trustworthy, relevant, and high-quality with something to offer.

Authority scores range from 1 to 100 and the higher your authority score, the better. It is difficult to influence your authority score, but many SEO experts believe its related to your link profile- make sure that you are getting external links from credible, well-visited sources.

Creating a Quality User Experience

The final reason that SEO is so important for business is this: all this time you put into creating great content and optimizing SEO improves the usability of your site- creating a seamless, positive customer experience.

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that search engines are fallible, and if you don’t take steps to counter this, your website will pay the price. You can counter this by understanding exactly how SEO works and by engaging in good SEO practices. You can use the elements of SEO discussed above to boost your business.  We work with a number of aspirational businesses on getting their business listing far better in Google search, if you need help in ensuring your business is listed correctly then please call us on 01392 241653 or contact us through the website here for a no-obligation conversation.