
Benefits Of SEO
In 2023, you may be beginning to wonder why SEO is important for business and why it’s still used today despite the continued momentum of social media and influencer marketing. In this 3-part blog series, we explore the features of SEO, the benefits of SEO and why you should be using SEO. This is part 2, in which we’ll cover the various benefits for having SEO and how it helps your business.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of optimising your webpages content for both search engines and users. The goal of SEO is to drive more targeted traffic to your website, in order to increase profit and meet business goals. This works by optimising a number of features, which we talked about in part 1.
Did you know? Search engines account for more than 65% of all internet activity and because Google owns over 80% of the market share, most of this activity was through Google. Not just this, though, but only 0.6% of searchers click on results from the second page of Google, meaning despite the majority of internet activity starting through search engines, getting to the first page is crucial for increased visibility, credibility, brand awareness and much more, which we go into below. SEO is all about getting to the first page or even top 5 results!
What are the benefits of SEO and how does it help businesses?
With 63% of the world on the web, which we mentioned in part 1, SEO has the power to reinvent your marketing strategy, if done well. By optimising your webpage or website for the right keyword, you can exponentially increase your organic traffic and leads. If your website has a discernable structure that causes the user to flow through the stages of AIDA (Attract, Interest, Desire and Action), this traffic will translate into sales, increasing your revenue and helping to reach business goals. Not only this, but SEO also:
- Can be free
- SEO can be free as you do not need any money to start; only a website. Keyword research doesn’t have to cost as you can use Google’s Keyword Planner, competitor analysis can be completely free and SEO implementation is free. SEO can be a great place to start digital marketing.
- Provides excellent ROI over time
- The longer you do SEO, the better it gets in terms of return on investment because you usually spend very little money or none at all with SEO. All it takes in terms of investment is time and effort. SEO ROI is a gradual increase over time.
- Increases brand awareness/visibility
- SEO can help with brand awareness and visibility due to the fact that successful SEO increases your rankings. If you’re in the top 5 results in SERPs for a search query, or even on page 1 at all, your website and therefore brand will be seen and searchers will be made aware of you.
- Increases credibility
- Targets the entire sales funnel
- SEO targets all stages of AIDA due to content. The large variety of content you release should target all stages of AIDA/the sales funnel. This is a huge benefit as it makes the most of every click. If a user clicks through to your site, no matter what stage they’re in, they should progress through AIDA, depending on how your content/site “flows” to facilitate that progression. Of course, the individuality of the user themselves are also factors to consider as interest, the second stage of AIDA will vary from person to person.
- Is trackable
- Measuring SEO provides quantifiable data that is great to use for identifying potential avenues for growth as well as seeing where to improve. It’s important to keep track of click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate. These two metrics will tell you what area of your SEO needs improvement. A low CTR may mean you need to work on your meta titles and descriptions. A high bounce rate may mean you need to work on your page content.
- Provides targeted traffic
- Keyword research/targeting ensures that your page shows up in SERPs for that keyword or synonymous keywords, meaning that whatever clicks you get are of higher quality and value compared to some outbound marketing efforts like TV adverts, where you’re hoping your target market sees it. Targeted traffic makes SEO more efficient.
Final Thoughts:
The benefits of SEO are plentiful and are key to succeed in the digital world. From targeting all stages of AIDA as well as providing targeted, valuable traffic, the inclusion of SEO in your marketing strategy can be monumental for business growth and for reaching business goals. Join us in part 3, where we go over the long-term effects SEO has on your business.