To be a successful business in 2023, your business needs SEO.
Currently, 44% of businesses use an SEO strategy (Search Engine Journal).
When you put this into context, it means that almost half of your competitors are using SEO to give themselves a competitive advantage.
This is something you can’t afford to let happen, especially in today’s competitive markets. Otherwise, you’ll quickly fall behind your competitors and lose lots of customers in the process.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of organically driving traffic to your website. Primarily, this works through content creation, keyword optimization, and indexing.
When you successfully boost your website traffic, it leads to a range of benefits discussed in detail later.
Because SEO is a specialist practice, many businesses don’t have the in-house employees to do it themselves. As a solution, they’re outsourcing SEO to digital marketing agencies. This way, they get to lift a weight from their shoulders and focus on other business functions while the SEO gets taken care of for them by someone else.
Moving into the future, the importance of SEO will grow year by year, which is why many businesses – from start-ups to big companies – are jumping on the SEO train now before it’s too late.
With that said, let’s take a closer look at five exciting reasons why your business needs SEO.
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Increased Website Visitors
As mentioned in the introduction, SEO helps to increase website traffic. The better your SEO, the higher the traffic – simple.
When businesses first start out, one of the biggest challenges they face is getting people to visit and interact with their websites. At first, it can feel like your website is a graveyard. However, through consistent SEO practices, a website can quickly turn from a graveyard to a consumer haven!
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Sell More Products
Online shopping has taken over the world.
In 2022 alone, there were 268 million digital buyers in the US (Statista). This number has continuously increased each year for the past decade.
With so many people shopping online, businesses are selling more products and services through their websites.
Naturally, when a business uses efficient SEO, more people visit its website. In turn, this leads to higher sales. It’s a simple yet incredibly effective process.
For any business struggling with low e-commerce sales, SEO is often the missing piece of the puzzle.
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More Credibility in the Eyes of the Customer
As was just established, millions of US consumers now shop online.
When they search for businesses on Google and other search engines, they typically only engage with ones that appear on the first results page. The reason for this is that businesses that are higher up in search engine results pages appear more credible and trustworthy.
Through SEO content creation (and other key practices), websites can quickly shoot up the search engines and make it to the first page.
For example, let’s say that you own a barbershop in New York. When men in New York are looking for a barbershop to try, they’ll search ‘Barbershop in New York’ on Google. Naturally, they’ll then only look through the first handful of results, as they automatically deem these to be the best and most credible. Through SEO, you could potentially send your own barbershop to the first page on Google, allowing you to boost your credibility and get in the mix with your competitors.
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A Better User Experience
Mobile-friendliness, user interface, and website speed all play a huge role in search engine rankings.
When these boxes are ticked, it provides a much better user experience, which is something that modern-day consumers care about significantly. After opening a business’s website, they want a smooth and enjoyable experience, whether they’re browsing products or searching for important information.
Remember, search engine algorithms are smart enough to detect how good a website’s quality is. When it’s good, they make sure to direct as many users as possible in its direction.
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Affordability
Compared to other digital marketing methods, such as PPC (pay-per-click), SEO is generally more affordable.
As mentioned earlier, millions of businesses now outsource their SEO to specialist agencies. This is an excellent cost-saving exercise, as it means they don’t have to hire in-house SEO specialists.
Also, there are lots of key factors that contribute to good SEO, meaning businesses have a choice to only select the elements that they care about the most (e.g., website speed and content creation).
Summary: SEO is All You Need!
If you’re an ambitious business that’s looking to grow and make some big moves in your industry, then using SEO techniques is absolutely essential. Within a matter of months, you should see lots of positive results, from higher website traffic to increased sales.