For most business owners, brand visibility is a vital component of success and remains one of the unchanging aspects of marketing. That’s why in this digital era, businesses that have online presence tend to grow 40% faster than businesses that do not have any online presence or any website to promote the business online.
One of the powerful strategies to build and boost online presence is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As the name implies, SEO is the application of search engine best-practices to help a website perform well in search results. It is so effective that in fact, 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
But despite the merits that SEO provides, many business owners today still believe that having a high ranking website is just a “nice-to-have” feature and not a necessity. This is evident among SME’s, wherein most small businesses don’t have SEO, they don’t know how it works and, therefore, don’t know what they are missing.
While SEO can be a technical and involved process, the results it can produce are well-worth the investment. If you need further convincing, let’s look at the ways SEO can help you grow your business.
1. Build Your Business Credibility
Studies have shown that people tend to associate the trustworthiness of business with their search engine ranking. The notion is that the best businesses can be found on the first two pages of the SERPs, while low-ranking business websites are perceived as less reliable and therefore, are less visited.
SEO helps increase your SERP ranking, which in turn plays a big role in enhancing your credibility that is crucial to attracting more visitors in your website and converting those visitors to leads and ultimately to loyal customers of your business.
2. Generate More Revenue
According to Google, 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase.
Google also found that local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day and that 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases.
These statistics mean that by optimizing your local and mobile SEO efforts, you will be able to get in front of consumers who are in the final stages of the buying cycle and that are ready to buy.
This is critical as more and more consumers expect businesses to have a mobile-friendly website and failing to do so means you’re losing potential customers to your more mobile competitors.
3. Improve Customer Retention
88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
If your website is not user-friendly, i.e., slow load times, non-mobile friendly, poor navigation, you will not only get a low search ranking, but you are actually making it difficult for your customers to stay engaged with your business.
Through SEO, you will be able to improve the user experience on your website, you’ll enjoy higher search engine rankings, and you can keep your customers from visiting your competitors’ site.
4. Gain In-Depth Insights About Your Customers’ Intent
By using SEO, you will also be able to identify the intention of your potential customers after landing at your website. Through the web analytics, you can uncover what actions your customers take, the pages they click, and the content they consume.
Through web analytics, an SEO practitioner can also “predict” what product will sell, what visitors want, and what action they will take on the site.
SEO provides analysis that will enable you to uncover wealth never-seen-before data about your customers intent. This analysis can serve as your guide to giving users a great online experience, which is vital to convincing them to spend money on your products and services.
5. Achieve Significant Cost Savings
Digital marketing campaigns such as SEO is very economical and quick to deploy to promote your business. Outsourced SEO services tailored for small businesses can cost around $1,000 or more per month based on the scope of the campaign.
Also, you can choose which SEO services cover your budget, and add on extra option and features as your marketing needs evolve. This means that you have complete control over your marketing spending and you can scale your efforts based on what you can afford, allocating or reallocating funds within your budget as needed.
This cost advantage makes it extremely viable for business owners who cannot afford to stick on expensive and time-consuming traditional marketing campaigns such as TV and newspaper ads, or just want to use a strategy where the ROI can be easily measured, and actual results can be accurately quantified.
If you are serious about surviving the increasingly competitive market and if you want to outperform your top competitor’s brand presence online, then you will certainly need an effective SEO strategy to support and promote your growth. Along with this, focused digital marketing efforts will help you achieve improved online visibility in the long run.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.