Benefits of SEO: How Optimizing Your Website Will Lead To Greater Results in 2017
By now, most marketers recognize that SEO is an important part of doing business online. To put it simply, if your website isn’t properly optimized, you are missing out. There are many reasons why you should start an SEO program if you haven’t already. SEO is a part of attraction marketing. Here are six of the top benefits of SEO.
More Website Traffic
Top positions in the search engines result pages lead to a lot more clicks, so ranking near the top can significantly increase the traffic coming to your website. According to research from Advanced Web Ranking, the top search result gets 30.1 percent of the clicks and over 50 percent of the clicks go to the top three results.
If you’re down at the bottom of page one, or even worse, stuck on page 2, 3, etc., you’re missing out on clicks. Starting the process of optimizing your web pages for search, will move you up the results page and help to improve your organic click-through rate, bringing more visitors and potential customers to your website.
More Sales & Leads
81 percent of shoppers research online before making a purchase decision. By optimizing your web content with the right keywords and phrases, you can engage potential customers throughout their purchase decision process and lead them towards becoming a customer.
Creating broad, awareness stage content can help you reach searchers during their initial research. As they learn more about the services you offer, their search queries will become longer and more specific. Targeting you content with long-tail keywords will allow you to appear in search results as they start to consider the different solutions that are currently available, and ultimately make a purchase decision. The more often you appear in those results, the more likely they will end up becoming a customer.
Increased Brand Credibility
People use search engines because they trust the engine to provide useful answers to their queries. As a result, websites that appear at the top of the search results page are seen as more relevant and trustworthy. The deeper they go into the results, the more skeptical searchers are likely to be.
By instituting an SEO program, you can improve the credibility and trust of your brand by playing off the trust that Google and the other search engines have already established in the minds of searchers.
Keep Pace With Your Competition
More and more companies are beginning to recognize the benefits of SEO. In 2016, US companies spent over $65 billion on SEO services.
With all of that competition, if you’re not optimizing for search, you’re falling behind. By creating new content, promoting it on your social media channels and earning links back to your website, you can increase your search rankings and ensure that the clicks that may have gone to your competition go to your website instead.
Measurable Results
SEO provides easily trackable and quantifiable results. With a combination of free and paid analytics programs, you can track key performance indicators like traffic, keyword rankings and conversions; in addition to demographic and other engagement metrics for everyone who interacts with your website.
You can track the complete paths users take in order to complete a purchase or fill out a contact form, all the way down to the keywords they used in the search engine to find your site in the first place.
Better User Experience
SEO is no longer just about the search engines; user experience is now a significant part of the algorithms that determine rankings. By making your website mobile-friendly, creating compelling, informative content, and adding loads of relevant photos and videos, you can keep visitors on your site longer. And the more time users spend engaging with your site, the higher it will rank.
By starting the process of optimizing your website for search, you’re also improving the user experience, which means you’ll experience even more benefits like increased conversion rates, more trust and increased brand loyalty.
Want to learn how to start driving more traffic and generating more leads online? Download our free guide to Search Engine Optimization Techniques.
The landscape of the Internet is ever changing and Nicole has the energy and aptitude to keep Stevens & Tate Marketing out in front of the pack. She leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, development, search engine marketing, online promotions and advertising for the web.
