Why your business should invest in SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a set of actions that can be taken on your website to help improve your ranking for search terms relating to your business/website.

Before the age of the internet if you wanted your business to succeed you would need to think about your office or store location – being on a busy high street would be better than an unused side alley. The better your location the more foot traffic you would get.

With SEO, your position in search engine rankings can be improved. Having a better position in rankings is like have a better location for your shop, it gives you more traffic. The easier you are to find, the more likely you will attract customers and make sales.

When you are searching for a product or service online do you ever go past the first page of results? Or even scroll down past the first few results? Very rarely. This is why it’s so important to be on the first page and in the top handful of results. When you get a shiny new website you want people to be able to find it easily.

So you’re probably asking yourself how much traffic would I actually get if I rank on the first page?

Well lets have a look at the numbers:

• 91% of google traffic is on the first page of search results.
• The number 1 organic result receives 33% of clicks
• The top 3 organic results combines receive 61% of clicks

So, what does this mean for your business?

If 1000 people a day are searching for a term relevant to your business, by ranking 1 on Google you would get another 330 people clicking onto your site every day. Whilst not all of those would be conversions, all of them would raise brand awareness and a certain amount would result in sales.

SEO improves credibility

By using search engine optimisation techniques to appear on the first page of results, the user will view your website as more reliable and trustworthy.

Google (and other search engines) want to keep their users happy. The best way for them to do this is by providing the most relevant links to their users search queries. Users trust Google because its in Google’s best interest to keep providing them with the best results it can find. So, if you are on the first page of search results user will inherently trust your website/brand.

SEO vs Google ad words

You may be thinking ‘why spend the time and money on SEO when you would get faster results with Google Ad Words?’. SEO campaigns on average take 4-6 moths to see measurable results whereas Googles paid ads get you to the top of results that very day.

Paid ads may get you to the top of search results but they only receive 10% of clicks. Compare this with the 90% of clicks that organic results get and it’s a no brainer that investing in search engine optimisation techniques is the better option.

ROI

Search engine optimisation is both an efficient and affordable marketing strategy. It has one of the best ROIs in advertising. The main reason it performs so well is because it presents your business to customers when they are actually looking for the product or service your business provides.

Customer insights

SEO generates traffic to your website. With tools such as Google Analytics you can get all kind of information about the customers on your site. This information is often invaluable as it will influence future business and marketing decisions.

The future of SEO

Based on the way search engines work currently SEO will continue to be effective in the future.

Search engines are continuing to grow and take up more market share. These days most people do not make a purchase without first checking online reviews and comparing products/services. It won’t be long before ‘most people’ turns into ‘everyone’ so SEO will only become more vital to businesses marketing strategies.

Investing in SEO is and will continue to be an important part of any businesses marketing plan. You definitely need an SEO strategy in place if you want your website to succeed and generate sales – get in touch with us to find out how we can help you.