3 Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Business

Digital marketing has played a big role in keeping some businesses alive during the last two years of uncertainty. With the current economic circumstances, many business owners see digital marketing as playing a crucial role in their future.

One lesson business owners are learning is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important investments to grow their business online. When done the right way, SEO can provide a return on investment at a consistent cost so you can use your marketing budget over time as your business grows for things like online advertising.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the process of improving your website to increase the quantity and quality of traffic when your products or services are searched for online. The best example would be Google or Microsoft Bing. Investing in SEO can produce higher ranking search results, which are proven to attract potential clients.

To many digital marketers, including the team at Greatshield Marketing, SEO is a process that combines content, branding, and promotion to organically attract potential customers to your website via search engines.

The following statistics show why investing in SEO is so important for your business.

1. There are more than 100,000 searches per second on Google. (Internet Live Stats)
2. 53% of US consumers say that they research products using a search engine before deciding whether or not to buy. (Google)
3. 46% of all searches on Google are for a local business or local service. (Search Engine Roundtable)
4. 28% of local searches result in a purchase. (Google)

3 Reasons Why SEO Is Important

1. SEO will improve your website visibility

For your site to be visible in search results, SEO plays an important role for that to happen. In the past, only those in certain industries with a lot of competition may have needed SEO to see their websites take the top spot in search engine results pages (SERPs). Now with digital marketing constantly evolving, regardless of what industry you're in, SEO has become necessary to reach potential customers.

Without SEO, your website will never gain the consistent traffic it needs to rank highly. Unless your site is properly optimized to load fast, have the most relevant keywords, and directly compete with others in your industry, you may find that it is hard to increase leads or sales without investing money in other digital marketing services like online advertising.

Greatshield Marketing (and its SEO services) can help your business implement the methods that are crucial for increasing your visibility in online searches and increasing your chances of reaching potential customers or leads while reducing the amount of money you need to spend on marketing.

2. SEO Increases Your Brand Awareness

Think about it, I'm sure you recall a time you needed a service and you searched on your phone "plumber near me" or something similar at least. Your potential customers are also doing the same exact thing when researching your industry online. How will potential customers searching on google find your business if your site doesn’t show up?

While you may know the basics of SEO, there's a lot to implement in actually optimizing your website. Or you may be learning SEO as you go, trying different things on your site to see what works. Does this sound familiar?

The success of your business shouldn’t be based on guessing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s possible for SEO to damage your website ranking rather than improve it. For example, link building can certainly help your authority, but using the wrong links, such as spammy links can result in your site being penalized—and even removed from search engine results.

Many SEO agencies have the knowledge and necessary experience to the right decisions for your site to increase your ranking and visibility.

When partnering with a trusted agency, like Greatshield Marketing, we create an SEO strategy for your business needs and also ensures you’ll know how to handle unexpected changes, like search engine updates. Qualified agencies have experienced these many times before, and can guide you through each potential issue easily.

3. SEO improves user experience and increases ROI

User experience often known as UX has played a big role in ranking for Google.
Therefore, SEO Agencies have gained interest in UX.

User experience and SEO go hand in hand when it comes to having a high ranking website.

We've all clicked on a website that doesn't load properly or is slow. That makes potential customers leave and use your competition instead. When talking about user experience online, we define a good user experience that:

• gives users the answers they need
• incredibly fast
• through a site thats easy to use on desktop or mobile

Another thing to keep in mind when trying to have a successful SEO strategy is search intent.

Common types of search intent are:

1. Informational
2. Commercial
3. Transactional
4. Navigational

Since SEO is a long term investment, it gains value over time. But a longer time frame will not help your business if the SEO strategy is poorly developed. Search Engine optimization ROI is more significant over time only when a website's content is nurtured inside the the frame of the strategy structured for it. Once your website content starts to get consistent views in the search engine results, it becomes easier to rank for high value keywords, which equals more potential customers.

Now you might be asking yourself, how much traffic is SEO responsible for?
Google controls a little more than 92% of the search engine market share worldwide. That includes 72% of the desktop market and 92% of the mobile search engine market. (Hubspot)
These statistics are why so many business owners see the value in investing in SEO.

Now what?

Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of SEO for your business, you may still have some questions. No worries! Get in touch to see how we can tailor a plan to your digital marketing needs.