It is every business owner’s ultimate wish that their potential customers easily find their company on the first page of search results. This is because a majority of search engine users (over 70%) click on one of the five top suggestions in search engine result pages.
Here is where SEO comes into play. Good SEO practices can improve the user experience and boost the online visibility of any website. Let’s find out what exactly is SEO and how important it is in digital marketing.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to a set of rules that optimize your website in order to achieve higher rankings on search engines’ organic results. SEO is a very important tool in your digital marketing arsenal and most businesses make it a part of their overall Digital Marketing campaign, which usually includes social media promotion, paid search and content strategy among many others.
SEO is essential for every business because it makes sure more users view your website thereby increasing your chances of selling your product or service online. SEO can help your website rank among the top five results, thereby increasing traffic to your website. Above all, SEO helps attract new customers and, over time, it allows you to build trust with your customers.
Primary Purpose of SEO
SEO serves two primary purposes.
- The first goal is to understand the needs of users online and create high-quality content that meet their expectations.
- The second goal is to create a website that search engines can index and understand.
Good SEO practices are a great way of increasing the quality of a site by making it more user-friendly, faster and easier to navigate. Listed below are the most important SEO tasks:
- Finding out what users are looking for in relation to your products or services.
- Creating content that makes users happy
- Introducing different SEO techniques that can be used to provide the correct signals to search engine crawlers.
Types of SEO
SEO can be divided into four main types as listed below:
1. On-page
On-page SEO refers to optimizing web pages’ title tags and internal links, HTML codes, URL, images and other elements on the page in order to improve rankings and user experiences. On-page SEO includes the following:
- Optimizing your website for Google bots by writing engaging, relevant and informative content
- Use HTML tags to highlight important parts of your material
- Examining broken links and content duplication.
- Reduce the file size for photos
- Structure the URLs for multiple pages in order to make them clear and concise.
2. Off-page
Off-page SEO can be described as anything you do that helps your website rank higher in Google’s search results. This includes obtaining good social media advertising, getting clients who are happy to leave you positive reviews on forums and getting links from other credible websites that work in the same industry as you.
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO’s primary purpose is to help Google’s bots index, crawl, interpret and index your website’s pages. To help web spiders categorize and filter your pages based upon their content, you can create an extensive XML sitemap or make your site mobile-friendly. Technical SEO is a post that provides more details.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO is one of the most important types of SEO. It helps local businesses become more visible on Google’s local search results. Local SEO allows businesses to reach their local audience through analysis of their search behaviour. Local SEO can help your local business rank higher in search results and in the local map pack. This will help you grow your business and increase your website traffic.
Benefits of Having Good SEO for Small Businesses
SEO and user experience go hand in hand because SEO is about building trust organically. Your website’s user experience describes how visitors interact with it. Your customers will have a better experience with your company, which can lead to more traffic and higher SEO. This organically will lead to a rise in your rank on search engine results pages and you will eventually reach the top 10 in search results. Let’s check out the myriad benefits that SEO assures.
Improves the website visibility on search engine
SEO is the key to online visibility because it allows websites to appear in search engine result pages. When searches for queries on the internet bring up results, SEO is responsible for allowing those results to appear. Traffic is more important if a page ranks higher than others. It is hard to be seen by the audience without a clear SEO strategy. We won’t like our website if it is hidden amongst a million other websites without anyone noticing.
SEO can help you increase your visibility and, depending on the purpose of your business, it can also impact the buying process. It is crucial to understand what people want and this can be found out by doing a through SEO research.
Cost-saving and organic rankings
Optimizing your site is possible with no expense. There are many on-page and off-page factors that we must consider. It takes great content and some techniques that we must learn. If anyone clicks on your website through organic search, we aren’t paid by the search engines. SEO can be a cost-saving alternative to paid advertising. If you want long-lasting traffic results without spending a lot, SEO is a good option.
Build brand awareness and engagement
SEO increases brand awareness. In fact, it is a great way to build brand awareness. Let’s say you have a website for your business. It is important that your website ranks among the top results for any search queries related to your business. SEO can help you achieve this goal and get a higher ranking in search results. SEO will expose your website or business to a greater number of people.
Helps in generating leads and sales opportunities
SEO has many benefits and one of the most important of these benefits is SEO’s ability to generate quality leads. According to 57% B2B marketers, SEO generates more leads than any other marketing strategy. B2C marketing may also be affected by this trend. According to the Search Engine Journal’s study, SEO leads have a 14.6 percent closing rate while outbound leads have only a 1.7% closing rate. These numbers show how important SEO can be to your company.
Enhances user experience and encourages customers to stay
A great user experience is another benefit that SEO guarantees. SEO is not only responsible for visibility and traffic, but it also affects the site’s behaviour. If your site is easy to use and navigate, SEO has a way to make your website compatible with all devices. This is crucial in determining how a website loads on different devices and how easy a visitor navigates through it.
Helps you rank better in local searches
The search engine’s main focus is on the keywords you have entered into the search bar. The search engine will show you the results that are most relevant to your keywords. If a website is optimized to a specific keyword, it will bring you the relevant traffic. It seems that the traffic that will arrive is high-quality and engaging. This increases conversion rates as people will already be searching for it.
Get more credibility and trust
Although Pay Per Click ads appear higher than organic search results, 67% of people prefer organic results because people trust algorithms a lot. They are aware that advertisers pay for the top slots and choose to visit the pages the search engine determines to be the best.
Ranking organically increases trust and traffic. The authority you create is essential to getting on the first page and staying there. SEO’s technical aspects, including page speed, backlinks and other authority-building elements, are crucial for achieving this credibility and trust. Customers will be more likely to trust your website based on its functionality. This can be achieved by having fast pages, security measures or automated customer service portals.
Long term strategy & build relations with other websites
Paid advertising can generate traffic quickly in the short-term. SEO, however, brings in more consistent traffic over a longer time period. While the paid form remains until we pay again, SEO is different. This helps sites to remain at the top of search results for a long time, which is why SEO is so important in digital marketing. SEO drives traffic to your website through its long term strategies and by building relations with other websites that provide an authentic link to yours.
igenr8 is a leading digital marketing agency and our team of professionals handles every aspect of a client’s digital marketing and SEO needs. We would love to speak with you about SEO and how it can help your business succeed. Tell us about your needs by reaching out to igenr8.
