Been hearing a lot of good things about SEO but you’re not sure if it’s worth the investment for your business?
Perhaps you think your business doesn’t lend itself well to digital marketing, or that your customers use other means to find you. While there may be some truth in those statements, it’s safe to say that any business can get good results with digital marketing, and Google is such a strong influence that even if your potential customers don’t use Google search, chances are they still use Google to find you (Nest, Google Maps, etc).
So, in this blog I want to touch on the many and varied benefits of SEO, why optimising your website can help in many more ways than just increased Google rankings and why you should consider investing in some search engine optimization strategies this year.
Trying to decide where to spend your marketing budget can be such a headache, especially when everyone is telling you different things. When you have a limited pot of money and you’re being torn in different directions – social media marketing, printed advertising, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, networking, etc it can be tricky to make the right decision for your business.
But chances are that you’ve already been doing some form of SEO for your business, it might be blogging, sharing your website on social media or installing WordPress plugins to improve your website. This is why search engine marketing is a holistic strategy that incorporates content, social media, web design and many other factors to get your website not only ranking well on Google and other search engines, but getting noticed and performing well for your target audience too.
SEO is a powerful marketing strategy for your business now, tomorrow and far into the future if the campaign is implemented correctly. So, is it worth you holding back on it any longer? Here are the 11 essential benefits of SEO and how your business could be missing out by not implementing search engine marketing into your strategy.
1. SEO Attracts More Visitors To Your Website
Are you struggling to attract traffic to your website? That’s such a funny term, isn’t it? I’m not sure who decided that motoring terms should be used for websites and SEO! Anyway. You might have spent a lot of money getting your website professionally made and looking great, but it feels like money down the drain as you haven’t had a single enquiry from it in the months since it was launched. Or perhaps you made your website yourself and are frustrated that it just doesn’t seem to be working. I mean, what’s the point of having an attractive website that puts a spotlight on you and what you do, if no one knows it’s there? More visitors means more leads and if what you offer matches what your visitors are looking for, more conversions too. SEO helps your website be found more easily by getting you as close as possible to the top spot in Google search results. In fact, you might not know that… organic SEO drives 51% of all traffic to your website. All those times you share your website address on social media, business cards and other promotional activity that you thought would do the trick, accounts for less than half your website traffic. And sometimes it’s through other Google services too, like a potential customer might make a search and use the maps function to find your business as you’re close to them, or see your reviews under your Google Business Listing and decide to check you out.
- 10% of traffic comes from paid search
- 5% of website traffic comes from social media marketing
- 34% of traffic comes from other sources
Let’s also mention social media in Google search results. Pinterest is great for SEO as are some other social media platforms as they allow Google to index posts, meaning that a potential customer searching for a specific phrase might find your Pinterest pin or LinkedIn article in search results and find your business website that way. Just imagine what adding search engine traffic to your website could do for your business. It’s one of the benefits of SEO that you just can’t ignore.
2. Improve conversion rates with a user-friendly website
Have you ever clicked through to a website from Google and then hit that back button because the design of the website was awful? Maybe it was too dark to read, or the text was just too small. Perhaps the entire page was full of a flashy video with no way to get anywhere else on the website, or one of those huge pop-ups covered your screen with no exit button. We’ve all seen “those websites”, but how user friendly is your website? Poor user experience makes it difficult for your prospective customers to buy from you. If they can’t find the information they need quickly, easily and intuitively they’re not going to waste time trying to figure things out. Google (and other search engines) don’t want to send their users to bad websites. Did you know that the time it takes to load your website could be deterring potential new customers from choosing you? According to Google developers, over 50% of mobile users won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load. So they click back to the search results and this increases your website’s “bounce rate”. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after just one page – ideally, you want your visitors to view multiple pages such as the blog they’ve clicked on from social media, to the internal page you’ve linked to in that and then the contact page. Whilst bounce rate isn’t necessarily bad, sometimes people do just need to see one page (or you might have a one page website!), it is used as a Google ranking factor so encouraging more page views is important. Your website visitors want a clean and uncluttered website that’s easy to navigate and relevant to what they’re looking for. So, improving your user experience and getting your website working well for your customers will give you extra brownie points for SEO and you’ll jump the rankings. Better search results + happier visitors = more revenue for you. This is where one of the benefits of SEO can improve so much more than just your search page ranking.
3. Search Engine Marketing is a cost-effective way to advertise your business
One of the painpoints about investing in SEO I often hear from potential clients is the cost involved. Search engine optimisation and marketing covers so many different areas that it does take time and resources to do well, and there is a cost factor associated with that. If your website isn’t working well on a technical level it’s going to need fixing, good content requires research, drafting and editing, and it takes time to understand your dream clients and what they need to see from you (and you’ll find none of this is covered by cheap SEO providers). The beauty of SEO is that it’s an organic form of marketing. Once you have the foundations in place and working well it pays for itself through generating those additional visitors and getting you leads and conversions. And there is a snowball effect to it, once Google sees you as a good website that keeps on top of good SEO practice, it’s more likely to rank your new copy and content well too. So let’s talk about price for a second. Take a psychotherapist as an example, to get their website ranking well, fixing website errors, creating new content and tweaking the copywriting might cost 2k but within a few weeks they’ve gained 10 new clients each paying £75 per session with an average of 4 sessions per month – that’s 3k right there. Let’s say the average time they stay with the psychotherapist for help is 10 months – that’s 30k! Suddenly, that big investment doesn’t seem so expensive after all! A good SEO campaign isn’t “cheap” but you do get what you pay for. Organic traffic is often far more valuable for your website, and your business, because it’s long-lasting. Although you may have paid for a professional to implement your SEO strategy, the work performed will last for months and years to come with the right maintenance. SEO really is a cost-effective form of marketing that can yield a powerful return on investment.
4. A good SEO campaign will influence your audience’s purchasing decisions
5. Search engine optimisation can drive offline sales too
A lot of small business owners shy away from using SEO because they don’t have an ecommerce website or sell services online. If this is you, you’re missing out because your website isn’t just for selling, it’s important for brand awareness, reputation, credibility and customer support too, so having it ranking well and easy to find plays an important role in that. Let’s take buying a car as an example. You head to Google to search for reviews, see what your preferred manufacturer is up to, etc and then you visit the car dealership armed with information on the models you want to see in person and test drive. It would be a longer and more frustrating process if you couldn’t see that deciding information online and whittle your list down to a few models straight away, wouldn’t it? The same principle applies for any business. If the information isn’t readily available, then your prospective customers will go elsewhere. Did you know, that 72% of consumers who performed local search visited a local retailer within a 5-mile radius? So, even if you don’t “sell online”, it’s still worth investing in SEO to increase your offline sales.6. You can manage your online reputation with an effective SEO strategy
Having the edge on your competition is important for your business to thrive. One of the best ways to achieve that is by having a strong brand reputation in place, and it’s important that your online presence is just as good as your “real life” one. You might spend a lot of time networking and getting to know people, sharing what you’re about and what makes you stand out from your competition. You might have physical brochures or information packs that serve the same purpose. A key benefit of SEO with the right campaign in place is that it’ll naturally boost your digital reputation as a business owner. Take a second to think about your own purchasing decisions. Let’s take hiring a plumber as an example. You’ll probably ask for recommendations on social media, and then take a look online to see what’s said about them, right? Your prospective customers are doing the same thing with you. 46.8% of the world’s population use the internet, so you can be certain that people are looking for information about you online. It’s up to you what that information is and how easily it’s found. A good SEO strategy will make sure that information is easily available, so your reputation is always strong online.7. Build brand awareness with an SEO campaign
A key benefit of using SEO for your business is to help you build brand awareness. Just like your brand reputation is important, so is general awareness and understanding of what you do. How are you going to reach new customers if there’s zero awareness that your business or website exists? In fact, 92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results. Only 8% of search engine users will bother to trawl the second page or further to find what they’re looking for. That’s why an effective SEO campaign is so important. Your prospective customers might not be aware that they need your products or services. They may be struggling with insomnia and are searching Google for hints and tips on getting a better night’s sleep. Let’s say you sell weighted blankets which help with anxiety, depression and insomnia. By creating a well-written valuable piece of content on “10 tips for a better night’s sleep” you can help that Google user find the information they need, and you can promote your weighted blankets and how they work. Your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for a particular term and find you on the front page of search engine results than your competition and other brands that don’t have a strong web presence.I know a lot of sole traders feel that building a brand isn’t important because it’s just them, they’re not a corporate entity or a team made up of various employees. But that is part of your brand identity – the personal touch, the individual behind the business and it’s probably one of your unique selling points too, but if you don’t create awareness around that, how will your dream clients know?
8. Outperform your competition with your digital marketing
If you’re not already using SEO for your business, there’s a strong possibility that some of your competition aren’t using it either. Although the chances of that are diminishing every day. Just by utilising a few SEO techniques to improve your web presence and digital marketing can help you jump above your competition in search engine results pages and give you the edge when it comes to attracting new customers. Did you know that 90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before starting their search? Imagine you’re a customer looking to buy a product. There are two websites selling the same thing. Which do you choose? The website that’s higher up the search results with an easy-to-use website, or the other one? Now can you see how SEO can benefit not just your bottom line, but your ability to grow and develop your business too?
9. Access customer data you can use to improve your overall marketing efforts
Any marketing campaign relies on data to measure and evaluate results, and search engine optimisation is no different. Google analytics provides a wealth of data on website visitors so you can tweak your SEO campaign and make it work better for you. But that information can also be used to strengthen your overall marketing plan. Google analytics provides information on user acquisition, behaviour and your audience, all key information that can be used to shape your overall marketing strategy. By understanding your target audience better and accessing information on them that Google analytics can provide, you gain new and improved insights on how to reach your ideal customers more effectively. And that matters, because as mentioned previously in this blog, it’s user experience and attracting the right audience to your website that not only increases your bottom line, but helps you climb the search engine rankings too.
10. Search engine optimisation connects the dots of all your marketing activities together
Not only can the information gleamed from your SEO campaigns be used to improve your marketing activities, search engine optimisation itself provides the common link between them all. Your digital marketing, social media, etc should all take customers to your website and into your sales funnel. Whether you’re using your website for selling or brand awareness and reputation, it’s the bedrock for you as a business owner as a point of contact, customer support, information and social proof. Similarly, your printed advertising, business cards, press releases, etc point your target audience to your website to find out more (if they’re not, change that now!). As I highlighted above, improving your website for search engines helps with user experience and keeping your customers interested in what you do, leading to higher conversion rates and more revenue. Your SEO campaign should inform your content marketing strategy, which in turn will improve the effectiveness of your search engine optimisation. In fact, 45% of businesses say that their content marketing is highly integrated with their SEO strategy – isn’t it time to add your business to that number?
11. SEO strategies work for your business 24/7
Yes, a good SEO campaign can be expensive though cost-effective form of marketing for your business. But my absolutely favourite benefit of SEO, and why you should consider the expense an investment is… search engine optimisation is constantly working hard for your business 24/7. Unlike big corporations, you can’t have somebody manning your phone all day, every day. When your printed advert has been published in the local paper, it’ll work for a day, maybe a month until it’s yesterday’s news and today’s fish and chips wrapping. Seasonal promotions are, well, seasonal. You see what I’m getting at, right? Most promotional activity for small business owners is short lived, but SEO strategies are constantly plugging away in the background no matter what else you get up to. Over 40 percent of business revenue is captured by organic traffic, which means your SEO campaign will keep on driving traffic to your website, generating leads and converting visitors into paying customers. So, there you have it. 11 benefits of using SEO for your small business, or put it another way, 11 reasons why you can’t afford to skip the search engine optimisation any longer. The online marketplace is becoming increasingly crowded as business owners are having to turn away from the high street and on to the internet, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. How we provide products and services to our customers today is completely different to just 2 years ago, and it’s critical that you keep up with your competition for your small business to succeed. To discover the benefits of SEO for your own business, get in touch with us for a friendly chat.
