If you asked us “What’s the one thing a company can do to best grow its business online?” there’s only one answer: Search Engine Optimization. In the last decade, SEO has become by far the dominant form of online marketing, and it continually demonstrates its effectiveness in creating new business opportunities.
Whether your business is physical, virtual, or a mixture of both, SEO is an affordable and highly effective way of growing your organization
Five Reasons It’s High Time To Embrace Search Engine Optimization
1 – Gain More Visitors And Leads
The #1 goal of SEO is to place your website as near as possible to the top of Google and other online searches. The closer a site is to the top of search engine result pages (SERPs), the more people click. In fact, more than 70% of clicks occur on the first page. If you are any further down in the ranks, the vast majority of searchers simply won’t see you.
2 – Increase Your Google Authority
Among the many factors Google uses to determine SERP placement is “authority,” which is how trustworthy Google deems your site. Good SEO is crucial for gaining this authority. It also translates to even greater search page exposure. When someone types a question into Google such as “What is General Relativity?” the top of the page is often a box with a direct answer to the question taken from a highly-authoritative indexed webpage.
If your website is in that top box when questions are asked, it can vastly improve people’s opinion of your business.
3 – Build Better Local Exposure
More and more people are using smart devices to research their local shopping while on the road. (Or at least in parking lots.) According to Google’s own data, fifty percent of smartphone-based local searches lead to an in-store visit that same day.
If you have a physical store, being highly visible in local searches is absolutely vital to ensuring your flow of traffic.
4 – Leverage Virtual Assistants
Users are now increasingly relying on AI Virtual Assistants such as Siri and Cortana. If a driver tells their iPhone, “Siri, direct me to a nearby grocery store,” Siri pulls the top local search result and then feeds that location data into their GPS map application.
They may not even see the search page, because they’re leaving the decision to an AI. The top result wins by default.
5 – Create Industry Influence
Finally, let’s think for a moment about how other business people within your industry, and in connected industries, look at you. After all, they’re using search engines to find information as well. If those searches lead to your pages, and they like what you see, you can pick up new business partners which might greatly accelerate your company’s growth.
In short, the relevance of SEO to growing businesses simply cannot be underestimated. It is the single most effective way of building leads and increasing your website’s visibility, and it’s a technique no modern business can afford to ignore.
