Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important tool that should be included in any corporation’s marketing strategy. Not sure why you should invest the time? In this article you’ll learn about 6 ways SEO can add value to your business!
SEO is the process of enhancing your website to improve its visibility in the search engine results pages (SERP) on places such as Google and Bing which can therefore drive relevant, organic traffic to your business and inturn, increase conversions. This is typically the main reason why corporations of all sizes will invest money and time into the services of a marketing agency, to partner with those who have the relevant skills and resources to drive strategic change and organic traffic.
Websites play a major role in the authority and credibility of any business, as well as the ability to serve a business’s customers in the best and most relevant way, which is why SEO is vital.
SEO is a lot more than it often seems. It’s not just about adding keywords into web pages, which is typically what it is seen as. Instead, it involves a variety of research, strategies, and critical thinking in order to drive your website to the top of the SERPs and drive that valuable traffic as technology and the search results are constantly evolving to meet the needs of users. This means the SERPs become a lot harder to rank in, as search engines strive to give users relevant and direct answers and information to their searches, add more features such as knowledge panels and rich results, while more of your competition get savvier with their SEO efforts.
With SEO, you are unable to pay for rankings, like you are able to with paid ads, instead, you have to put in the hard work, over a long period. Search engines have sophisticated algorithms that determine the rankings of web pages, and that’s why, within an SEO strategy, a range of factors are considered, including the optimization and relevance of your website, user experience, mobile-friendliness, technical health, domain authority, and much more.
With this range of improvements on your website, what most corporations don’t realize is that when you opt to enhance your SEO, you are benefiting from it in many other ways, too. SEO is well known as the foundation for any marketing efforts, as it refines what your website users want, and how you can utilize that information to benefit all your campaigns.
Here are 6 ways SEO can add value to your business.
Better understand the habits of your clients
While, as a business, you may think you know what your clients want, SEO will actually provide you with real-time information on what exactly is trending and what they really want. Buying habits can easily, and sometimes drastically change, depending on your industry, global events, hot trends, daily routines, and new innovations. SEO will be able to properly inform you of the buying habits of your clients, and not only will this dictate the SEO strategy for optimization and ranking in the correct places, but it can also inform other important strategies within your business.
This information can skyrocket your business by tailoring the way that you create and deliver your products, in line with their buying habits.
Improve the customer journey
The research obtained from creating your SEO strategy will tell you where your customers are on their journey, what they need, what challenges they are facing, important traits, and much more. By learning this information, you will be able to understand the journey your customers embark on, from beginning to end, and include these in your bigger strategies, for example, how your website navigation flows and the blog content you provide to inform your customers better.
This will instill trust in your clients as you provide them with solutions to their challenges while making it easier to find the most relevant information to help them on their journey. Remember that SEO is not just about driving in the clients who know what they want, but also capturing those who are much earlier on in the sales funnel and don’t know what the solution is just yet. SEO will help you find these users and take them on a journey.
Inform your product development
SEO will not only enable you to drive relevant users to your products, but the research obtained from an SEO strategy will also inform you on how clients are using your products, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the market. This information is valuable, as it will enable you to develop your products to better serve your customers, reduce the challenges they face, and ensure clients maximize the benefits of your products.
This also enables you to rise above your competition and put yourself at the forefront of your industry. The marketing team and product development team often work apart, however, it is vital that the gap is bridged internally and effective communication is opened between your two departments.
Support your social media efforts
SEO can inform your social media strategy and boost its efforts in a variety of ways. Most importantly, the information and keywords that you learn about your clients, how they search, what their challenges are, what solutions you need to provide to them, can provide you with the content ideas you need to skyrocket your social media efforts.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, also strive to show the most relevant information to their users. This means that the keywords and information you learn about your clients, and what they are searching for, can greatly inform what you post on your social media platforms for greater results. More eyes on your social media content mean more potential traffic to your website.
Manage your reputation
Reputation management is an important concept for large corporations and can be positively impacted and managed through the use of SEO. A good SEO strategy enables you to produce and rank positive content in the SERPs. This means you are better able to serve your customers through helpful and informative content, building your trust and credibility, while putting your name in front of big brands in the industry, which will also build your authority.
If your business has ever been involved with challenging times, SEO also enables you to push more positive content to the top of the SERPs.
Improve your website
SEO is not only about writing content and optimizing pages. It is also about improving the technical health of your website and improving its functionality to please both customers, as well as search engines. Google is one of the most popular search engines used around the world, with approximately 5.6 billion searches per day.
The Google algorithm is not fully understood, but there are certain elements that SEO specialists know are ranking factors, which include page speed and user-friendliness. This forms part of the technical health of your website, which once improved, for example, page speed, will benefit your rankings, your visibility, as well as your customer journey (because who enjoys using a slow website?)
SEO is fundamental to the success of any business. Not only can SEO increase your visibility in the SERPs, drive relevant, organic traffic and increase conversions, but it can also significantly accelerate your business growth through managing your reputation, informing your product development, improving your website, supporting your social media efforts, help you to better understand your customer journey to improve their journey with you and much more. The information you are able to obtain through SEO is invaluable to your business, however, it will only be effective if you employ the correct expertise and strategies, and play the long game by staying consistent with your efforts.
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