Search engine optimisation or SEO can do a lot for your business, helping it grow and flourish both online and offline. Simply put, SEO involves optimising images, content, videos, and incorporating keywords into your website for search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google.
Search engines will rank your business’s website based on how well it has been optimised for SEO, given it has followed white hat SEO techniques, not black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO techniques, if caught, can lead to Google penalising your website, lowering your rank, and worst-case scenario, banning your website for good.
The Importance of SEO for Your Business
The internet, combined with social media, has placed more emphasis on businesses to adopt measures to rank their websites for SEO on different search engines. Most businesses have realised the importance of SEO and have readily started approaching SEO agencies to assist them.
You can approach an SEO agency to help you optimise your website for SEO and compete with your competitors who already have taken that step, but with the aim to surpass them in ranking. Here are a few reasons why SEO is crucial to the success of your business:
- Users are more likely to click on one of the top five websites that appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If you want your business to show up on the first page, SEO can make it happen for you.
- SEO also serves as a promotional technique to market your business to your target audience. Apart from Google, other ways users can find your website is through Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
- SEO ensures your website keeps running smoothly. If your website has more than one author, you can benefit from SEO in two different ways — direct and indirect. The direct benefit you will receive is an increase in your search engine traffic, whereas the indirect benefit you will receive is using the same framework or checklist to create and publish a blog.
- SEO has the potential of putting your website in the first position on the first page on Google. For instance, you and your competitor sell the same type of product or provide a similar service, but your website is optimised for SEO. This means that Google will rank your website, not theirs.
- Your target audience trusts Google to answer their questions accurately and display only those websites that are relevant to their query. A business optimised for keywords will rank higher on Google. This means users will trust your website, thus making it likely for them to purchase something from you.
3 Issues Businesses without SEO, Can Experience
When it comes to establishing a strong online presence, small to medium-sized businesses struggle the most. Without SEO, they only add to their struggles to become visible on search engines and attract their target audiences. One of the reasons why their focus on optimising their website for SEO may be less is because they are occupied in handling other aspects of their businesses.
This can include resources, time, and employees. Since you are making the major decisions on the direction you want to take your business, SEO may get neglected. Without SEO, the following concerns can become a problem for you:
- Larger businesses in your industry have more resources and bigger budgets
- Limited resources and finances of your own
- Fewer or remote locations than your other businesses in your industry
You can expand your business by optimising your website for SEO. You do not have to do it yourself, but you can recruit an SEO agency to do it for you.
How SEO Can Help Businesses Flourish Online
If you want your business to rank well on search engines and be noticed by your target audience when they perform an online search, investing in SEO will help you. Here is how SEO can help increase your website traffic and grow your business:
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Improves the Construction of Your Website
Google uses algorithms and web crawlers (an automated script or program, which browses the internet in a methodical and automated way), to rank your website. A poorly constructed website or one that contains content that has nothing to do with the business, web crawlers will find it difficult to decide if users can benefit from your landing on your website.
If you want to improve your rank on search engines and want web crawlers to read every web page of your website, ensure you only have relevant content on your website. An SEO specialist can analyse your website and remove any irrelevant and unnecessary information from it while optimising it for SEO.
For instance, creating effective and concise meta descriptions on every web page will increase your chances of receiving website traffic through search engines.
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Design Appealing and Eye-catching Web Pages
When a user lands on your website, you want them to stay longer. To do that, you need to design attractive web pages. Dull and boring web pages will limit the users’ interest, causing them to exit your website without reading the information present.
An SEO specialist can improve the readability of your content by ensuring it is clear, simple, and concise. This will make it easier for users to scan your website and absorb the information written on it.
The key is to strike a balance between visual aesthetics and content to keep users interested to stay and browse your website. Just remember one thing when designing your website — the design of your website should not overpower your content. Make your website is attractive and your content is useful enough to prevent your target audience from going elsewhere.
Add Keywords to the Content to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
When you search for a product, service, or information on a search engine, you type in certain keywords and phrases to find them. Google’s web crawlers do the same thing. They scan the internet to find pages that match the keywords or phrase you have typed.
This is why you need to optimise your website for those keywords and phrases. If you have relevant keywords and phrases in your content, web crawlers will rank your website.
Read more about SEO Content Marketing Tips.
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More People Will Find You
SEO can help you reach out to a larger customer base than before. The more customers you attract, the more word spreads about your business. Your target audience will find you on their own without you having to print ads, flyers, signboards, or film a commercial.
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Improves Customer Retention Rate
Your target audience is not looking for a puzzle to solve when they visit your website. They should not have to figure out where they need to go to find what they are looking for, as navigating to the page they want to go should not be an obstacle.
If it is an issue, they are less likely to solve it and more likely to take their search for a product, service, or information to another website. Make sure you have a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate website.
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Always Remain in the Spotlight
A properly SEO optimised website helps you stay in the spotlight forever, given you continue updating your website for the latest SEO practices and techniques. For this reason, investing in the services of an SEO agency is important because you can go to them after every few months to ensure your website is performing well on search engines.
If you are doing that regularly, no one can remove you from the spotlight because you are here to stay forever. When you are in the spotlight for several years, you will also attract more users your way.
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Increases User Engagement
You want to establish a solid relationship with your target audience, which means you need to communicate with them more often. Since SEO puts you on the map, more users are likely to find you and engage with you through your website or social media platforms.
Engaging with your customers means increased sales and revenue. That can only happen if you receive a lot of web traffic, which will not be possible with SEO.
Can Businesses Stop Performing SEO Once Successful?
Businesses should not stop performing SEO even when they achieve a high rank on Google and other search engines. Even though your website is earning the clicks, there always will be a business trying to steal your crown.
For this reason, you need to continue to optimise your website for SEO no matter how well your business has been performing as of late. Another reason to optimise your website for SEO is Google. The search engine keeps improving their algorithm and your SEO needs to comply by it to keep their crown and position on the search engine.
If you run a business and you are in dire need to find the success on search engines that you seek, you need to get in touch with an SEO Agency. They can examine your website to determine your areas of weakness in terms of SEO and fix it helping you bridge the gaps against your competitors and therefore helping your business grow.
