The Importance of SEO

What you need to know

SEO is one of if not the most important element in digital marketing, this is because SEO helps improve your page rankings on search engines like Google and Bing, given how many people use search engines getting high rankings on them means more people will be aware of your business.

Creating a digital marketing strategy for your business can be challenging. You might have questions like: should I focus on my website’s content, develop ads, or only work on my social media? How do I make sure that people look at the content I post? What kinds of content are best to post? Why is SEO important?

While posting ads and running a great social media campaign can help your business, one of the most important parts of digital marketing is the process of optimising your business’ content to ensure it appears in search results. This process is called “search engine optimisation,” often shortened to SEO. SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87% on average compared to digital advertising. Let’s go over the importance of search engine optimisation, including what it is, its most important elements, and what it can do for your business.

What Is Search Engine optimisation (SEO)?

“SEO” is short for “search engine optimisation.” To put it as concisely as possible, search engine optimisation describes the process of optimising a website to rank higher in search results. Examples of this include writing articles, adding new web pages, getting backlinks, and ensuring that your website runs quickly and smoothly. Search engine optimisation is a critical aspect of any business’s modern digital marketing strategy, so understanding how it works and how best to use it is a great idea if you want to ensure that your company is a step ahead of the rest.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines like Google use a complicated algorithm to decide which websites and what content are ranked when a user performs a query. The algorithm considers various factors when evaluating what to rank, including content quality, readability, and each page’s ease of navigation. It is impossible for anyone to list each and every factor search engines take into consideration; Google alone uses more than 200 unique factors to rank websites.

There are three types of SEO: technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Technical SEO involves backend fixes, like loading times and image sizes. On-page SEO involves using target keywords, using appropriate headers, and checking for readability. Off-page SEO involves using backlinks and connecting with other websites to create a ‘network’ of pages.

The better your search engine optimisation strategy, the more likely you will rank high in Google’s search results. Creating an excellent search engine optimisation strategy and adapting to search engines’ algorithms is incredibly important for any modern business, whether digital or a physical shop.

Search Engine optimisation vs. Social Media Marketing

You might think that because you have a social media marketing strategy in place, you don’t need to focus on search engine optimisation. A social media marketing strategy involves posting paid ads on social media, creating targeted social media posts, and interacting with clients on social media to form positive relationships.

Yes, social media marketing is important, and it can be a great tool as part of a larger digital marketing strategy. Social media marketing isn’t a replacement for search engine optimisation, though. Hubspot reports that these strategies generally work best in conjunction. It is best to create a digital marketing strategy that includes elements of both search engine optimisation and social media marketing, with a focus on the former, for most businesses.

Why Is Technical SEO Important For Businesses?

In 2022, search engine optimisation is no longer a strategy that only the top players in any industry utilise. Instead, it is a necessity for all modern businesses. If you don’t utilise search engine optimisation, it is likely that your site will not receive any traffic from prospects at all. In fact, over 90% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google. If your website does not receive any traffic, you miss out on countless opportunities to reach out to leads and invite them to try your product.

Though search engine optimisation is an often overlooked strategy as a whole, technical SEO is an even more overlooked category of SEO. Technical SEO involves optimising your website for usability. Here are just a few reasons why optimising your technical SEO can be a game-changer for your business.

Improves Accessibility

In the process of improving your website’s SEO, you will also inherently increase your website’s accessibility. For example, SEO technicians perform tasks like adding alt text to images, ensuring that users can access your webpage on mobile, and lessening each page’s load time.

This ensures that more users, especially those who live with disabilities, can access your content and web pages. You might not realise that almost a quarter of the UK population – 22% – live with disabilities, meaning that you absolutely must ensure that your website is inclusive.

Improves User Experience

Just as implementing technical SEO can make your website easier to access for those with disabilities, technical SEO also optimises your site for all users. For example, while optimising your site for SEO, you should increase your page’s loading speeds. Considering the highest e-commerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds, speeding up load times and optimising your website’s backend are critical parts of SEO that most people might not consider.

What SEO Can Do For Your Business

If you do not have a search engine optimisation strategy in place for your business, you are missing out on an extremely important aspect of your overall marketing approach. SEO can level up your business’s visibility, build authority for your business, increase your sales, and provide you with a myriad of other benefits. Let’s discuss just a few of the ways SEO can help your company.

Builds Your Brand’s Authority

Ranking high in Google’s search results will instantly build your brand’s authority in your industry among both competitors and among prospects. The more visibility you have, the more authority you have. Prospects are significantly more likely to trust companies that rank high in Google’s search results than those that don’t; in fact, any results past the first page tend to fade away into oblivion. This is because a whopping 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results.

If you want to build your brand’s authority through search engine optimisation, you need to do more than just rank for one target keyword. Instead, you’ll need to create a cohesive keyword strategy and earn backlinks from similar websites. This way, you can regularly appear in prospects’ search results and make an impression on them.

Gets Your Leads’ Attention

A huge portion of websites on the internet do not receive any traffic at all because they haven’t optimised their content for search engines. It’s worth considering that the average click through rate on top Google results is roughly 10 times higher than on tenth place results.

In other words, if your content isn’t ranking in Google’s search results, then your prospects aren’t clicking it. On the other hand, if you do find yourself ranking high for relevant terms, it’s highly likely that your prospects will click on your content and want to see more. By optimising your site according to Google’s algorithm, you can rank higher in search results and thus gain your target audience’s attention.

Provides Valuable Information

Running a blog, or even just hosting a quality website for your business, can be a great way to quickly and efficiently share information about your business and industry. Not only can you write articles about what you, your employees, and your business are up to, but you can write informative content that will lead to more clicks and thus establish trust in your prospects and more authority in your industry.

Conclusion

The importance of search engine optimisation in 2022 for all businesses cannot be understated. Any digital marketer you meet will likely tell you that their websites are a crucial source of traffic and visibility for the businesses they support. In fact, 75% of digital marketers say they feel their search engine optimisation tactics are “extremely effective” or “very effective” at helping them achieve their marketing goals. If you haven’t created a search engine optimisation strategy for your business yet, it’s time to start. By implementing search engine optimisation strategies, you can reap the many amazing benefits of this modern approach.