Friday, July 14, 2017

A Novice’s Guide to Understanding the Benefits of SEO for Businesses

By Mark Zeni

I have a small website for my garage business; will SEO be helpful for me?

Will SEO help my e-commerce startup?

I have just outsourced SEO for my website, will I get more leads?

These are some of the questions that cross the minds of newbies going for SEO. To understand how you can benefit from SEO, you’ll have to learn the basics of SEO first & then see how a persisting SEO campaign can boost your business.

So What Is SEO?

It stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the techniques of bringing your website on the front page of various Search Engines e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
These techniques aim at increasing the quality and volume of traffic to your website with the help of organic search engine results.

Traffic Quality

Although you would love to have any type of visitors (except hackers though) to your site, however, if you are running a garage business and the Google is driving traffic for garbage business, will it be of any use? No. The quality of traffic refers to visitors that are relevant to your website offerings and may lead to some fruitful results.

Volume of Traffic

Once you have the right kind of visitors coming from the search engine, the more the traffic, the better it is.

Organic Traffic

Traffic to your website from inorganic means may give a temporary spike in business, but in the long term, only the organic traffic is the way forward as you won’t have to pay for it.

How SEO Benefits Your Business?

Business owners and managers are constantly looking for ways to enhance their businesses. When the traditional ways of doing business are increasingly becoming costly, the digital ways are cheaper and tend to be more efficient as well.

While having a website is the first step in online business, the sustainability and growth come from persistent SEO campaigns. The benefits of such campaigns are realized in the due course of time. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages:

Increased Traffic:

When your website appears in the top position on search engines, it starts to get a lot of clicks, and this shows in the form of increased traffic. With SEO, the site has keywords that are frequently used by the visitors to find information on the internet or making purchases as well.

Enhanced Usability

All SEO efforts are aimed at making it easier for the website crawlers to navigate and index a website, but simultaneously these efforts make the website more user-friendly as well.

The various on-page efforts which add search-friendly keywords to the site also improve the navigation structure of different inner pages as well. If these efforts make it easy for the search engines to rank your site, they also make it easy to find relevant information on the site.

Increased Branding

It is critical for you that your website can be easily recalled by the relevant users while they are looking for information or buying a product related to you. This easy recall is the result of sustained efforts of SEO to rank the website on the first page of the various search engines.

This branding is done by the search engine optimization and is very much needed in any business. Remember how we tend to trust results that pop up in the top? When more and more pages of your website rank high in the search engine results page the better will be the brand building for your site.

More Effective

When it comes to marketing, there are various channels for it. But these different channels have their costs-benefits. From TV ads to posters to direct marketing, all are focused towards promoting businesses. But the effectiveness of these ways varies. When it comes to SEO, it is de facto the most cost-effective marketing method as it directly targets the visitors looking for the products and services.

SEO is the best inbound strategy as it enhances the experiences of the visitors coming to the website seeking goods and services. The traffic coming to the site as a result of your SEO efforts is more qualified than other marketing methods making it more cost effective than the others.

Round The Clock Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of the search engine optimization is that your site opens a 24*7 marketing channel. Your optimized site ranks on the result page not just for a single day but every day and throughout the year and until you want.

Better ROI

With SEO, you can be assured of the results that can be tracked for relevance and ROI. You can track the improvement in rankings, traffic, and conversions. The analytics provides even the granular information about the geography and the profile of the visitors who have visited the site. In the case of the e-commerce sites, you can track the path that the customers have taken to complete the sale. You can even identify the keywords your customers have chosen to reach the desired product or the service offered. If you have no e-commerce site, you can monitor the form fill-outs and the other things to calculate the effectiveness of the SEO campaign.

Higher SERP Means More Leads & More Business

With essential search engine optimization, higher ranking positions result in more productive results. It means more customers coming from the contact forms, more likes for the information provided by you or increase in the followers for your brand. All in all, it results in more business for you through the organic ways.

In The End

To avail the benefits of SEO, you must:

-Have a visitor friendly website that users find easy to navigate
-Have compelling content which is informative and complete.
-Optimize the website for robots and crawlers for improved indexing and navigation.
-Believe in persistence, as SEO brings in long term benefits than short-term fixes.

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Source: Daily Blog Tips