The Internet is like an ocean where rivers of information are gathered every day. The world is now fully interconnected thanks to the internet. And this gives business owners potentially billions of customers all around the world. As more businesses are utilising the internet, you need to take necessary actions to keep your business aloft and visible among your strong competitors. This is how a Search Engine Optimisation Agency helps in! We will now discuss what SEO is and the importance of SEO for your business.

What is SEO?

Before we go into details about the importance of SEO for your business, it’s important that you understand what really SEO is. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is the process of increasing the quality and also the quantity of the visitor’s traffic to your website. This can be achieved both organically and through paid advertisements. Importantly, the long term SEO focus for any business should be achieving a decent amount of good quality traffic organically.

As mentioned above, SEO is not particularly completing a checklist of things that will make your website rank high. It’s an ongoing process of evolving practices to make your website valuable to your visitors. This will increase your traffic and bring you up in search rankings.

The importance of SEO

And now for the million dollar question. Why is SEO important?

This section covers 5 most important reasons as to why you should invest in a good SEO campaign for your business.

1. Visibility

The highest priorities to set your business apart from the competition is to high visibility to your targeted customer. Just like it says in the joke: you can practically hide a dead body on the 3rd page of Google, because no one’s going to look there! Search Engine Optimization of a website ensures that you are visible and visible when you need to be.

To stay visible online, you need to optimize your website through carefully chosen keywords. This ensures you are there for your potential customers to find when they search for something relevant. The best method is to be as specific as possible when you pick your keywords. This is so as not to get lost with the tide.

2. Credibility

If a business doesn’t show up in a decent ranking, people tend to question the credibility of your business. This applies no matter how long you have been in the business. People tend to unconsciously make a mental note of your ranking. And whenever they come across your brand, they end up having low confidence.

Hence, it is extremely important that you build an online presence and run a good SEO strategy. This applies even to businesses that are well established offline. This practice can be leveraged for startups and small businesses to compete well with the big and established brands.

Eg: Many “indie” makeup brands are now dominating the beauty industry by surpassing big brands. Much is done through credibility they have acquired by good products and good SEO, Social Media and marketing strategies.

3. Traffic

Your search engine ranking has a direct impact on the amount of traffic you get for your website. Only a small percentage of visitors directly search your brand name in the search engines.

Therefore, Search Engine Optimisation Services by optimizing your website under a good set of long and short tail keywords is important. As this ensures you get the right kind of traffic to your website which will turn into leads and finally to conversions. The more traffic you get for your website, the better you rank in search engines. Eventually, it will create a snowball effect to get a consistently good traffic to your website.

4. Ability to laser focus your target

All the tools and methods used in Search Engine Optimization allows you to target your audience very specifically. As search engine evolves, you are allowed to use long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are extremely specific to whatever you are selling. In this way, the traffic that comes to your website is mostly in the state of decision making. Rather than merely looking at your website.

Search Engine Optimization goes hand in hand with Inbound Marketing. Inbound marketing ensures that you provide enough value to all potential customers in all stages of buying a product. This will not only increase your customer acquisition rates but also customer retention rates.

5. Higher Return on Investment (ROI)

For the most part, investing in offline marketing is similar to shooting in the dark. Despite how deep you go in with the research, you get only a very vague feedback. These feedbacks do not usually get you high ROI. This is especially relevant to startups and small businesses.

When it comes to SEO, if you manage to provide value with your website and the product/service you are selling, the ROI is usually very high and measurable. SEO takes you right to the customer when they are actively searching for your product/service, which gives you a better chance to make it into a conversation within a short period of time.

Many business owners make the mistake of trying to integrate SEO into their marketing strategy later on, rather than focusing on it from the beginning. SEO is not the icing that you add to decorate the cake that is your website, but the egg that you bake it in! Good SEO is about consistently providing quality and value to your visitors, while making sure that you are easy for them to find!

We all can relate to a website that simply stalls before loading content, or in another typical scenario, experience content that loads painfully slow. Most of us agree that either experience is annoying. But beyond annoying web visitors, let’s find out what the real consequences are for a sluggish website.

Show Me the Money

Once you assign a dollar value to speed, it becomes crystal clear in terms of real costs why the enduring visitor perception and experience with page speed relates directly to customer service and brand value.

For example, KISSmetrics presented statistics from Akamai who studied the dollar cost of speed as it relates to page conversions. They found a 1-second delay in page response time results on average in a 7% increase in page abandonment. The kicker here is that page abandonment exponentially grows as seconds add up, so a 4-second delay results in about 28% page desertion, which means your sluggish website is hemorrhaging visitors and potential income at an alarming rate!

Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal if you measure things like downloads and other call-to-actions where speed is not considered a critical metric, but it is an important metric when applied to an e-commerce site making $100,000 per day.

Think about it; a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales per year. Additionally, page speed is an important online metric for both perceived customer service and brand quality.

Check Your Website’s Speed

What does speed mean to website managers in 2018 and beyond? Don’t ignore it! Do everything in your power to increase the page speed of your website for both desktop and mobile sites. If your website is responsive, make sure it works well on every device imaginable. If you test your website and it’s found to be less than optimum, contact a competent web developer who knows how to optimize your website’s speed. It’s more affordable than most other SEO endeavors, and you have nothing to lose but customers-right?

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see your score and take notice of any advice they may give you in the results. Secondly, take a look at the size of your page, as many sites are bloated nowadays. Try to shave off as much as you can by optimizing images, compressing code and loading fewer external scripts and ads.

Maybe it’s time to drop the most egregious designer “cuties” that bloat your website and go with a more minimalist approach. What customers love most about your site is the content and how quickly they can see it!

Google Loves Speed, Too

Speed is most critical when web visitors are using mobile devices, but desktop websites are not off the hook. Google takes note of your website’s optimization for all devices, and poor results reduce search ranking automatically by its Page Rank algorithms. If your website speed is annoying enough to catch Google’s attention, then it’s a sure bet your user experience is in the toilet, too.

Of course, there are over 200 factors that make up Google page ranking; however, not all elements are weighted evenly or even come close to the importance of speed. Yes, your website should be responsive so it can work well on all types of devices. Yes, you should have a security certificate whether you are doing e-commerce or not. And yes, you need to optimize your website for speed. Once these things are in order, you can continue to add to the list, but these items are the most important after great content, which will always be number one.

David Little is the owner of Buzz Marketing specializing in affordable website design with an emphasis on factors that generate buzz, sales leads, and new business, respectively. David has a diverse background in emerging digital technologies as a product engineer during the advent of digital video before becoming involved with marketing in the high-tech industry for the last 18 years. Today, he focuses his efforts on helping small businesses to be more successful with marketing because mistakes are costly. David is also a partner at Fox Web Creations, where you may view additional examples of how Little and his team can assist you.

Nowadays people start their day by checking & searching online content. People connect through search engines more than using their browser. 93% of online experiences these days begin with a search engine. Search engine pairs the person’s searched word with the most relevant web page. 75% of those 93% people don’t even pass through the first page. Research has shown that there are 6,586,013,574 searches per day.

Search Engine Optimisation is done to rank your website high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Some of the best SEO practices are:
1. Make sure that your website is user & SEO friendly.
2. Create unique & attractive content.
3. Utilize your main keyword across various tags of your website.
4. Share your content on different social media platforms.
5. Implement tools like Google Search Engine, Google Analytics etc to help you track your website.

Why should we do SEO for our website?
Once you create your website, you have to drive traffic towards your website. You can do this through social media, email marketing, SEO services etc. Through social media & email, you can target a lesser number of an audience than you can with SEO services.

Your website may be attractive but until & unless it is SEO friendly it will not get displayed on search engines. Having a business online & not getting visitors is a drawback on its own. Letting traffic, leads & sales slip through your fingers is a not a good thing for your business.

Research has proved that local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within a day, & 18% of local searches led to a sale within a day. By doing SEO on your website, your website visitors will increase which will indeed increase your sales. SEO services are one of the best services that digital marketing has provided for local business & entrepreneurs.

Hence I have come to the conclusion that these days just having your business online will not give you any sales. You have to make your audience aware of your website through Social media, emails & SEO services to increase your site visitors which will indirectly get you sales. You have to also do advance SEO to get your site on higher ranking & maintain that rank while competing with other websites. A good SEO score will get your site on top position whereas a penalty will decrease your SEO score which will affect your site ranking.

An online presence is essential for any modern business that wants to get noticed. In addition to having a well-designed website that has high-quality and engaging content, the website must be well optimized. The proper use of SEO is necessary to make sure a website gets listed high in the search engine results for the most desirable keywords and phrases. In many situations it can benefit to pass this type of work to an expert who has the proper knowledge and know-how to get the website ranked on the first page in the shortest time.

Let’s take a look at four benefits of making use of an SEO expert:

Use proven techniques

The SEO expert is certain to stay up-to-date with the latest industry news and techniques to make sure a website is optimized to achieve the best results. This industry is very dynamic with constantly changing ranking criteria and formulas that must be understood. Also, the major search engines often update their ranking algorithms, so it is always important to know and use the latest safe techniques to help the website rank.

Invest proper time

Performing regular SEO to a website can be a time-consuming process. If this work is passed to the experts, they will be able to invest enough time to ensure the website gets the right exposure for the chosen keywords. With proper SEO in place, it is possible to rank for a lot more relevant keywords that will make it possible to compete more effectively with the closest rivals.

Increase the income

Any website that is well optimized is in a better position to generate more income for a business. Ranking high in the search engines is especially important for those businesses that solely operate online. If the website isn’t given enough help to get well ranked, it will likely perform with poor results. An SEO expert will be more effective at getting a combination of low and high competition keywords well listed to ensure brisk business is possible.

Also, if a website if ranked high in the search engines, there will be less need to use paid advertisement to reach the target audience, which can help to save a lot of money over the long-term.

Focus on the primary business

The ability to rely on the expertise of an SEO expert means that you can free up your own time to be more productive. Simply outsourcing certain parts of the business that can easily be taken on by others will take away a lot of stress and leave you to concentrate on areas that demand the most attention.