When it comes to digital marketing, the successful use of SEO is crucial if your business is to thrive. But why is SEO so important?
SEO, business visibility, and branding
When people search online for your services and products, you want your own business advert to appear as close to the top of the page on Google, Bing or another search engine as possible. SEO rankings are more important than just trying to get people to click through to your website and make a purchase.
Most people when presented with search results don’t just search once, click on a few sites, and then give up. More usually, they will continually edit their search terms, repeat the process, search again, and so on, until they find exactly what they want. This means that if you can continually show your ad in all those search results, you are gaining more and more brand awareness and increased visibility.
Although this might not immediately bring sales, it will raise the profile and credibility of your business, rather like having a shop on a main high street as opposed to on a dingy back alley.
Increased ROI
SEO is great for increasing your ROI. That’s because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, i.e. it markets to potential customers when they are searching for the services and products your business offers. Rather than interrupting people’s TV viewing or newspaper reading, your business is shown to them when they actually search for something they want, making it far more likely that they will convert to sales.
Customer insight
While SEO generates invaluable traffic to your website and landing pages, Google Analytics tracks the traffic, allowing you to gain insights into your customers’ browsing habits. You can see information such as where searchers are located, what they search for, the language they use, the days and times when they are most active online, and much more. All this information is extremely valuable because it can help you to make informed and educated decisions around your advertising strategies, both offline and online.
Boost your online presence
SEO is an extremely valuable tool that can be employed to drive traffic to your website, raise the profile of your business, and provide you with insight into your site visitors’ surfing habits. This combined with the metrics you can glean from Google Analytics can be used to hone your digital marketing strategy so that it produces the optimum results in terms of ROI from your advertising spend.
