Understanding the Business Benefits of Best-in-Class SEO

There are currently over 1.8 billion websites on the internet. If your business has a website, it must compete for its position in the search engine results pages (SERP) against thousands or even millions of other sites. Getting to the top spot takes hard work.

This hard work is known as search engine optimization, or SEO for short. If you’ve never heard of SEO, you’ve been doing your website a disservice for too long and it’s time to start smart marketing by optimizing your site and all of the content on it.

But what are the business benefits of SEO?

In this article, we’ll uncover some of the impressive advantages of using small business SEO in your organization.

Organic Search Is a Great Source of Traffic

Very often, organic search will play a major part in the performance of a business’s website.

As any smart marketer knows, Google owns the lion’s share of the search market and Google is the most visited website in the world. For this reason, you should follow Google’s guidelines.

Being very visible and a trusted resource to Google and other search engines will always work in your business’s favor. Having a great-looking website and using high-quality SEO will ensure you become trusted in the eyes of Google.

SEO Leads to a Better User Experience

SEO has many facets and you should always try to work as many angles as possible. For instance, SEO requires you to optimize all of your content including your images. You’ll also need to think about making sure your website loads quickly and that it works on any device.

All of these things add up to an improved user experience for your site’s visitors. A better user experience leads to higher conversion rates and better brand recall.

Most businesses want better visibility and organic rankings. Many overlook the fact that having the perfect user experience will help you attain this.

Google knows that user experience matters, so this affects your ranking factor.

SEO Targets Quality Traffic

One great business benefit of SEO is that it is an inbound strategy. That is to say that it’s not an outbound strategy that involves contacting consumers if they want to be contacted or not. Inbound marketing is focused on making it easier for your audience to seek you out when they need information from you.

Unlike outbound marketing methods such as cold calling, interruptive ads, or spam emails, inbound marketing centers on the customer.

Not only is this much more convenient and less annoying for customers, it means that consumers want to find your website, meaning you’ll result in more qualified leads.

SEO Builds Trust

The primary goal of SEO should be to establish a foundation for your website that provides a great user experience and is discoverable in search.

There are many elements that go into establishing and maintaining authority with search engines such as Google. Authority builds trust. This can be accrued over time through the following elements:

• Positive user behavior
• High-quality backlinks
• Killer content

Establishing this authority will do considerably more for your brand than most digital marketing strategies. The only issue is that building trust takes time.

Building brand authority requires patience, commitment, and effort. It is also reliant on you providing a good quality product or service that customers can trust.

Local SEO Leads to Higher Engagement, Traffic, and Conversions

With mobile traffic on the rise, local search has become pivotal in the success of many small and medium-sized companies.

Local SEO sets out to optimize your website for a certain area, so people can easily find you. This puts you closer to the transaction.

Local SEO focuses on certain towns, cities, and states. Understanding SEO will allow you to optimize local citations and local listings that are relevant to the industry and area in which the brand belongs.

To help boost engagement at a local level, you should optimize your Google My Business listing and Knowledge Graph panel. You need to also focus on obtaining reviews on Google and other listings sites such as Yelp.

SEO Has a Positive Impact On the Buying Cycle

One of the biggest benefits of the internet from a buying perspective is that customers will generally do their research.

By making use of SEO to promote great products, services, or deals will always be a massive game-changer. This will have a positive impact on the buying cycle when handled in the correct manner.

Brands need to be visible where people need them to be. Local SEO improves that visibility, allowing customers to find answers from businesses.

SEO Is Good for Cost Management

When you have great SEO, and a top-ranking site, there’s no need to buy pay-per-click advertising for your site. You’ll always stay at the top of the search results for as long as users continue to click on your links in search.

Many of the best inbound lead generation techniques used in small business marketing are free. These include SEO, blogging, referrals, and social media management.

Understanding the Business Benefits of Best-in-Class SEO

There are many great business benefits of SEO. SEO generates good quality organic traffic, builds trust with consumers, leads to a better user experience, better conversion rates, and higher engagement.  SEO is also great for cost management while having a positive impact on the buying cycle.

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