Anytime your customers get online, 93% of them tend to start by using a search engine.
Search engine traffic is now a firehose of potential customer demand that small businesses need to fight for. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the set of tools available to empower your business to bring in more organic search sales. With SEO, your focus gets to be on inbound marketing that meets customers at that point of need.
As you grow your brand awareness and credibility, you not only generate more quality leads but also develop a better lifetime value per customer. Here’s a comprehensive look as to why you need SEO for your firm’s long-term growth.
1. Generate Higher-Quality Traffic
At its very core, SEO is dedicated to making sure that your website gets more visitors who find it useful for their needs. The primary means through which SEO can help you achieve higher quality traffic is via an inbound marketing strategy.
An inbound marketing strategy is one where a business capitalizes on meeting the needs of customers who are actively searching for solutions to their needs. Unlike an outbound strategy, inbound is not focused on hardcore selling.
Instead, you essentially sell without selling. As customers query search engines for what they need, you ensure that you strategically position your solution to meet them at that particular query point.
Since inbound marketing aspires to meet the customer at their point of need, it ends up drawing in higher quality prospects. Through SEO, you will be attracting prospects who are actively looking to solve a particular need. Thus, if your offering resonates with them, you are likely to have higher odds of converting them into paying customers.
SEO, therefore, offers your business the life-giving benefit of targeted traffic, and that’s what every aspect will focus on.
2. Improve Your Customer Experience
Customers don’t remember a lot about a business they deal with, but they can never forget how dealing with a specific firm made them feel. Did a particular company make it ‘buttery smooth’ for you to solve your problem? Did they go above and beyond your expectations? You will likely carry that perception with you down the line.
In terms of your website, there are several aspects SEO can leverage to make a visitor’s experience on your site attractive. Your site’s loading speed is one of the first things that a visitor gets to encounter. Statistics show that websites that load within five seconds capture user attention for 70% longer than those that load within 19 seconds.
Using SEO, you can monitor your server response times to ensure that your site does not take too long to respond, frustrating customers.
Alongside with site speed, page speed (how fast individual pages on your site load) also impacts the experience your customers have. SEO can help you achieve better page speeds by helping you minimize the size of files on your website through compression.
But it’s not only site and page speed that impact a user’s experience. Redirects offer a stumbling block that can force visitors to abandon your site. A 404 redirect is when a visitor clicks on your website only to get an error report that the content they are looking for doesn’t exist.
SEO audits can help you identify a breakdown in your content that can ward off visitors. As a result, visitors to your website won’t feel frustrated by missing content.
3. Boost Your Brand’s Credibility
As your brand becomes more credible, you not only generate more income in the short run, but you also create momentum for the long haul. There is no place where you need excellent brand trustworthiness more than where the customers go to look for solutions to their problems.
When people get online to look for that product or service they need, they tend to stick to the first few search results. While there is no practical explanation for this user behavior, it’s possible to say that since people trust Google, they believe the first results must be what its algorithm deems best.
On top of this kind of response, users who run a search query tend to bypass the paid-for-ads on top of the search results. That makes organically ranking on top a vital need for small businesses as it carries more weight with customers than paid advertising in the same position.
SEO gives your business the ability to capitalize on this peculiar user behavior so that you can gain greater brand respect from potential customers. Through a combination of several tactics, you can take advantage of a well thought out SEO strategy to climb up the rankings, making your brand more credible.
4. Promotes Low-Cost Advertising
The traffic you can generate using SEO is free, and that helps you save a tidy sum on your advertising. As a small business, that has a tangible impact on your operational cost-efficiency.
When search engine algorithms serve up results from a search, the first page gets over 70% free traffic. If your small business can tap into that, it can help subsidize your advertising costs. In turn, you can take the funds you save and direct them to other forms of business advertising to stimulate holistic sales growth.
5. Enhances Sustainable Competitiveness
As an entrepreneur, you don’t want to keep playing defensively all the time, reacting to competition and other market dynamics. You also want to go on the offensive and gain ground so that your firm can grow.
As you tweak each aspect of your digital marketing and advertising strategy, SEO helps you make sense of it all. Working with experienced digital advertising partners like this SEO company can help you develop a coherent digital brand objective. It’s this joint objective helps you steadily gain market share.
SEO is known to be a long-term strategy, and the competitiveness your firm gains from it also keeps benefiting your small business. That ensures that the competitiveness you gain can become sustainable.
Understand Why You Need SEO to Reap the Gains
A majority of customers who go online to look for goods and services are starting by running a search. For your business to be competitively positioned at this critical customer demand juncture, you need to understand why you need SEO for your business. The better your understanding, the greater your ability to reap from it.
Do you want to stay ahead of the pack and satisfy more customer demand? Thumb through our business-related articles to learn exceptional entrepreneurial skills.
