Can SEO help your Business?

By utilising an SEO marketing strategy, you not only draw more eyes toward your business, but you can target those who need what your business provides. In addition to optimising content to include targeted keywords, SEO involves checking your site for accessibility, ease of navigation, appropriate use of headers, and many more concepts.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engine optimisation works by optimising your website and its content to better appeal to search engines like Google, thus appearing in search results more often. Search engine optimisation marketers conduct many different processes to optimise a site for search engines, including optimising target keywords, adding appropriate headers, increasing ease of navigation, and increasing content readability.

If you want to use search engine optimisation to promote your company, you should first understand how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo process information and why common SEO techniques actually work to increase traffic.

Understanding Search Engines

Search engines like Google use a complex algorithm to identify the best search results for any given query. In doing so, they complete a three-step process: crawling, indexing, and sending out search results. For your webpages to rank high in Google’s search results, you need to ensure that Google can crawl your site and index it properly.

Step 1: Crawling

Search engines constantly ‘crawl’ the web using ‘crawlers’ or bots. These crawlers follow links and explore the web to find new pages. Crawlers then save these links internally to the search engine’s index. Information about those pages is stored and indexed.

Step 2: Indexing

During the indexing phase, the information found by Google’s crawlers is added to the search engine’s index. The index is a collection of web pages, resources, and other information the search engine can pull from.

Step 3: Search Results

This step is initiated whenever a user performs a search query in the search engine. During this phase, search engines search their indexes for results that are relevant to the searched information. They look at backlinks, relevance, page speed, and various other factors to collect relevant results and rank them in order of significance.

How SEO Works For Businesses

Searching, crawling, and indexing web pages might sound like a complicated process. Still, once you understand the basics, it is easy to think about how you might optimise your business’s website for Google and other search engines. Search engine optimisation tends to pay off for companies; 60% of marketers say that SEO is their highest quality source of leads.

To see results, you need to ensure that your pages are indexed in the way that you want them to be and that they will rank when your leads search related terms.

For example, if you are a dog food business, your customers might be Googling “healthier alternatives to Purina.” To ensure that potential leads are able to find your business, you might strategically include a phrase like “our dog food is a healthier alternative to Purina” in an article and on the homepage of your site.

When Google indexes your site, it will include this text, increasing your page’s chance of ranking when someone Googles this term or related terms. Of course, there are other factors you will need to optimise for as well, including readability, appropriate use of headers, and technical aspects like page speed and ease of navigation.

How SEO Can Benefit Your Business

Implementing a search engine optimisation strategy can help your business in numerous ways, from bringing in new customers to increasing your authority and trust with existing customers. Let’s discuss a few ways SEO can benefit your business in the short term and the long run.

Increases Visibility

One of the main benefits of SEO is attracting new visitors to your site and introducing new people to your business. Using target keywords in your content and on your website ensures that individuals looking for concepts related to your business can find your business. Further, you can reach people that turn a blind eye to ads. 86% of people ignore every paid banner ad they see, only clicking on organic search results.

It’s even more important to consider the benefits of SEO if you have a local retail business because people tend to perform a Google search before deciding which local businesses to patronise. If your digital presence isn’t optimised for individuals to find you when they search topics related to your business, people might not even know your company exists.

Establishes Trust And Authority

Not only does a strong search engine optimisation strategy help get more eyes on your business, but it also helps you establish authority in your industry and disseminate valuable information to leads. Improving your search engine optimisation strategy involves providing consistent, quality content to your readers and customers.

By providing accessible and useful information to others, you establish yourself as a voice of authority in your industry. As Entrepreneur magazine reports, with millions of businesses competing for visibility, the content you produce helps set you apart.

Helps You Understand Your Audience

By creating and executing a search engine optimisation strategy, you will come to understand more about your audience and how you can appeal to them. For example, in your initial research phase, you should consider what terms your audience might be searching for and then research which articles are ranking for those terms. You should observe what is working for your competitors and use that information to better your own content and understand what draws in your target audience.

Decreases Your Marketing Costs

Paying for ads and other forms of digital marketing can get expensive, even when you take a PPC approach. SEO is a cheaper, yet equally or more effective, alternative to PPC ads. SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41% on average compared to digital advertising.

Increases Website Traffic Value

Not only does SEO decrease your marketing costs, but it also increases the value of visits to your blog. In fact, SEO can increase the business value of a blog visit by 429%, according to Terakeet. More valuable blog visits mean more sales.

By implementing good search engine optimisation strategies, you ensure that fewer users immediately click away from your page and instead stick around to read the valuable content you provide. When leads believe that your content and information are valuable, they will be more encouraged to click your calls to action, whether it’s booking a call, filling out a form, or even initiating a sale.

Conclusion

Whether you run a digital shopfront or a high street stop, implementing a search engine optimisation strategy for your business could bring you more visibility, bring greater authority in your industry, and ultimately lead to more sales for your company.

When more people see your website and your content, more people see your product, and you have more opportunities to make sales. Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication, but you can ensure that your page makes the grade by practicing good search engine optimisation.