Why You Need an SEO Strategy
SEO is one of the best ways to increase your chances of being seen on the first page of Google or any other search engine. In fact, it’s one of the only ways. While PPC can offer instant visibility, coupling this technique with SEO will present users with a better experience and improve your chance of driving them to your website. SEO is achieved by creating a website with relevant, high-quality information for both visitors and search engines. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, you’ll need to build it gradually with an SEO strategy. In this article, we explore exactly why you need an SEO strategy and how it can benefit your business.
What is an SEO Strategy?
Before we go any further, let’s explore what an SEO strategy actually is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Essentially, an SEO strategy is a series of actions to help your website appear in search engines. There are several ways to create the strategy and you can either create it yourself or outsource to a professional.
Why Do You Need One?
For many small businesses, SEO seems to be an oversight; however, having a strategy in place will boost your business by improving its visibility. Many people believe that SEO is too complicated to understand and takes too long to put in place. While SEO can be confusing and does take a while to kick in, having a strategy in place will ensure you reap the benefits. Below, we explore some of the benefits of an SEO strategy.
Improve PPC Quality Score
If you run PPC campaigns, you’ll know how important Quality Score is. Interestingly, Quality Score and the content on your site go hand-in-hand. A good SEO strategy can improve your PPC Quality score by creating pages on your site for your products and using relevant keywords throughout the site. By using the same text on your ad messages and website content or directing PPC traffic to relevant landing pages, you can improve your Quality Score. In turn, this can improve the performance of your ads and even reduce your cost per click.
Increase Market Access
If your website appears on the first search engine results page (SERP), you’ve got a much higher chance of getting a click. Over 70% of searches result in a click for one of the sites on the first page. With this in mind, investing in an SEO strategy can increase traffic to your site and increase market access.
Boost the Effectiveness of Your Other Marketing Efforts
An SEO strategy can increase the effectiveness of your other marketing efforts like retargeting and PPC. Coupling search advertising and SEO can boost traffic by 50% while coupling retargeting and SEO can drastically increase brand awareness. The insights from your SEO can also be used to fine-tune your ad campaigns; if you have keywords that are working well for your organic search, you can add them into your PPC campaign and see whether the performance improves.
Improve Offline Conversions
On average, 50% of mobile searches are conducted by people looking to visit a business that day. With this in mind, good SEO can improve your offline conversions. A good SEO strategy will result in you having consistent business information and listings across the web that include your hours of operation, phone number and address. This information makes it easy for a user to get in contact and become a customer.
Help You Stand Out from Your Competitors
The first page of SERP has three map listings, six paid positions and 10 organic listings. If you’re able to appear in a map listing, a paid listing and an organic listing, you will increase your chances of someone visiting your site. If your competitors only appear in the paid listings, as opposed to all three, you’re likely to stand out from the crowd.
Help You Get Found Organically
Organic search is often the primary source of website traffic. An SEO strategy will help your website to be found organically, resulting in more visitors and potential customers. Organic search is also a critical part of the marketing funnel and ultimately getting users to complete an engagement or conversion.
Build Trust & Credibility
An SEO strategy will help you to build trust and credibility. One of the main goals of SEO is to build a strong foundation for a website and make it easily discoverable in search. Many elements go into establishing trust with search engines like Google. Credibility is built over time as a result of things like positive user behaviour, quality backlink profiles, machine-learning signals and optimised on-page elements and content. An SEO strategy can help to build all of these elements.
Stay Up to Date
SEO best practices are constantly being updated. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t set up your SEO and then just leave it be; instead, it needs to be re-evaluated consistently over time. Having an SEO strategy in place will help you to keep up to date with the SEO best practices and stay ahead of the competition. Monitoring for algorithm changes will benefit your business and ensure you don’t fall too far behind.
Long-term Investment
Although SEO can cost money, it’s relatively cheap compared to other marketing strategies. This is particularly true if you implement your own strategy instead of outsourcing the project. Even if you do pay a professional, the money you spend will be well worth it. Instead of being a mere marketing cost, SEO is a business investment. Providing that you keep up-to-date with the algorithm changes, good SEO will keep your business on top for years to come.
If you don’t have an SEO strategy, it’s time to implement one. Not only will good SEO bring in organic traffic, but it will also boost your other marketing efforts, improve offline conversion and help you stand out from your competitors. Providing that you keep on top of your SEO once it’s implemented, it will get stronger year after year.