SEO, or in full search engine optimization, is working on improvements on your website to gain top positions for search queries. It is often the biggest source of traffic for brands. You have probably heard about SEO before, and how you need it to reach your business goals. But actually understanding what SEO can do for your business goals is often tricky. In this blog we will show you 8 different reasons as to how SEO will help you grow your business to the next level.
SEO helps you reach the right target audience
Reaching the right target audience might be the most important part of marketing as a whole. The better your targeting is, the higher your odds are to get the conversion. SEO focuses on reaching the right target audience through keywords. These keywords are the words that your target audience will fill into search engines to find the service or product you are selling. For example a potential customer could be looking for a frying pan. By making a landing page focussed on frying pans you can reach that exact target audience in search engines.
Gain traffic and conversions organically
Reaching the right target audience and having gained the top positions you need in search engines will result in a gain in traffic and conversions. SEO will increase your traffic by letting you target your audience on keywords, which means that you will now have visibility in search engines you’ve never had. For example a keyword could have a monthly search volume of 20.000. If your page ranks between the position 4 and 10 this means on average you will get 5% of the clicks. This means that on a monthly basis you will get 1.000 visitors on a single keyword. Reach the top 3 positions and this becomes 25%, which means you’ll be gaining 5.000 visitors per month on that single keyword. This means you’ll be gaining between 40 and 200 conversions on a single keyword with the e-commerce average of 4% conversion rate. By filling the funnel with quality traffic both your traffic and conversions will increase with SEO.
Improves user experience
But that won’t be the only way SEO will help with increasing your conversions. SEO also means improving your website’s user experience. The goal of search engines is to serve quality content to users of their search engine. What they want is for their users to land on websites that give the exact results they will be looking for. But apart from that, they also want their users to have the best possible experience on that website. With SEO you will also work on increasing the user experience in both a technical and content way. Your content will be fully focused on serving the exact text that the user will need to have the best result out of their search. Your website should be technically the best as to give the user the best experience in things like speed, accessibility and many other things. By increasing the user experience you will not only increase your ranking, but also the conversion rate., meaning you will gain even more conversions.
Improves brand awareness
SEO means being visible in search engines when potential customers are looking for your products or services. This means SEO will automatically improve your brand awareness.When someone is looking for your product or service you will be visible in the search engine, your name will be in their eyes. So even if you do not get the click, this means you have already had a touchpoint and later in other marketing activities like SEA or social ads they will already recognize your name. SEO is also about getting credibility through other websites linking to yours. This means if you start branding your brand on other websites, like for instance with blogs, you can both increase your SEO results and your branding in one go. For example you could gain, or buy, a blog on a website on which you know your target audience comes for inspiration. You can write an inspirational blog that will mention your brand and also links to your website. You will have gained a valuable link in the eyes of search engines, telling them to notice you more in results. Once you gain more of these types of links, your authority in the eyes of search engines will rise and you will also have a higher chance of ranking on the first page of search engines.
Gain long-lasting results
SEO is a long-term marketing solution. SEO is not meant to give you results tomorrow, it’s meant to give you results on a longer term, that will also stay long-term. Gaining a top position is not something you can just do in a matter of a week. In most cases it takes an average of 3,6 months to gain the top 10 position you want. But that also means, whoever wants to take it from you, has a 3,6 month setback in which you can have already done optimizations to make sure you are catching up to those above you, and leaving those below you behind. If you read between the lines you can also see that your gained positions won’t just be taken over, meaning that the results you will have to work hard for to get won’t just disappear.
Understanding SEO means understanding your customer
The best SEO results come when you have full understanding of your customer. It means being there at the right time, with the right text, with the best optimized website. This means you need to know exactly what your customers are looking for in what phase of the funnel and how to serve that on your website for the best experience possible. For example you might be selling products for health, like omega 3 pills. With SEO you can focus on not just “buy omega 3”, but also reach your customers in the top of the funnel with content especially written for that. Your product will give certain gains to your customers for certain pains they have. In this example it could be that they always feel tired and have a hard time focussing. They will start searching for solutions for this. One of these solutions could be that they are not eating enough fish, which means not enough intake of omega 3. By writing content especially about being tired and not being able to focus you can show the customer that you have knowledge about their pain. Better yet, you have the solution to their pain: Omega 3. As you can see it takes a full understanding of what your customer thinks of when they are looking for your product, even if they did not know yet that your product was the solution to their pain. By working on SEO you will find out exactly what types of content you can use to reach your potential customers, but also exactly how your website should work to get the best results.
SEO helps you beat your competitors
SEO is one of the best ways to get ahead of your competitors. By gaining a position on the first page you will instantly gain a piece of the online search market for your product of service. Both of you might not have started SEO yet, meaning no one is gaining any clicks. You can get ahead of your competitor by starting now and start gaining those top positions. Meaning you will reach a part of the market that your competitor is not having any piece of. In the case of your competitor already starting and you haven’t, this means you can actually take a part of their piece of the pie. There can only be 10 results on the first page, which means if you take one higher than your competitor, you’ll be pushing them down if they do not keep ahead of you. Imagine that they’re currently in the 5th position, which means they’ll be getting 9,51% of the clicks. You are now currently in the 9th spot, getting 2,72% of the clicks. This means your share is smaller, but if you take them over and you take that 5th spot you will get that 9,51% of the clicks. Pushing them down to the 6th place, which means from now on they will get 6,23% of the clicks. You haven’t just only gained market share in the online search market, you also pushed your competitors down a notch on their gains from the search engine market.
SEO is relatively cost-effective
SEO means you will have to invest and also stay a step ahead. This means you often have to start with a bigger investment than other types of marketing like SEA and Social Ads. What makes SEO relatively cost-effective is that there is no such thing as paying per click or view like you would have to with ads. In the world of advertising you will always be paying to get every sale, always biting in the margin you’re making on that sale. In the world of SEO you won’t be paying per click or view. You invest in a solid website that ranks high and gains traffic through positions and conversions both through traffic gain and an increase in user experience. Meaning that your biggest cost will be the investment in the start, so once you are starting to gain the results you need it will be paying itself back. Once it has paid itself back, the results will not just stop, they will keep on coming and increasing the cost efficiency of your investment. With SEO you can start scaling down on your ads so you can stop paying for every single sale you make on your website.
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