Are there any benefits when you invest in SEO for your business growth? How much value can SEO offer your business? Is SEO a crucial element in the growth of a business online?
You are just about to find out answers to all of these! So, be with me as we analyze together some benefits and advantages of SEO to your small business.
In the world of digital marketing, there are several techniques and methods that you can use to grow your business, one of the most viable digital marketing strategies is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Table of Contents
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization is the digital marketing science of enhancing a website to boost its visibility on a search engine so that the website can capably attract more prospects to your products and services.
it has been proven over and over again that a website with good visibility on search engines has a better opportunity to capture leads and conversion for the business.
SEO explores the organic route to get traffic to a website from search engines such as Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduck, Startpage, and other alternative search engines available today.
The ultimate goal of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine result pages is to make sure that the site appears above the fold on top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
How Does Search Engine Work?
A search engine is a system that crawls through websites and indexes them based on certain criteria, like keywords, metadata, links, etc. The process of crawling through websites is called crawling and indexing. The process of rendering these indexed sites in accordance with specific criteria is called ranking.
Search Engines are widely used tools in the world of the internet.
A search engine can be classified as either a general-purpose search engine or a special-purpose search engine. A general-purpose search engine attempts to index and provide access to as much of the web as possible, while a special-purpose search engine is site-specific, they focus more on narrower content or data sets such as images, news, shopping, or video on individual websites.
The process of searching for information involves entering one or more keywords into an Internet search engine’s “search bo”. The system then returns information related to the keyword(s), which typically appears in the form of links followed by short summaries of the linked pages’ contents.
Search engines are designed to index and rank the content on the web according to a set of algorithm ranking factors. It’s important for you to know these ranking factors if you want your website or blog to rank high on search engine results pages (SERP).
According to several online sources, there are over 200 Google Ranking factors, below are 10 of the most important Google Ranking Factors you should pay attention to the most:
- High-Quality Content
- Quality Backlinks
- Search Intent
- Website Loading Speed
- Mobile Friendliness and responsiveness
- Domain Authority
- Keyword Optimization
- Website Architecture
- Website Security
- User Experience
Benefits of SEO for your Business
Here are some important benefits of search engine optimization that your business can enjoy when the right web positioning strategy is put in place;
Increased Organic Visibility
SEO increases organic visibility and helps to drive high-quality traffic to your business website, by making sure that the content on your site is relevant to specific keywords, which are then linked back to your site.
An enormous advantage of SEO is the growth in organic search rankings that comes with it. An efficient SEO campaign will target the right people with the right questions in order to bring your web pages to them.
Organic visibility is a website’s rankings in search engine results. This rank is based on the quality of content and relevance to what people are searching for. When you create high-quality content, you will naturally rank higher because the website will be more relevant to what people are looking for.
Quality Website Traffic
There are many potential benefits of SEO, and the most important is that it can help you to get quality website traffic. The more people find your site, the more opportunities you have to convert them into customers.
Social Buzz
SEO can also help to create a lot of social buzz for your business. When companies use SEO techniques to build their brand awareness, they often increase the amount of customer engagement on their social media pages and website. In addition to the increased traffic, you can get from SEO, there are also many other benefits such as increased brand awareness and more visitors to your website.
Improved ROI
SEO delivers an ROI that is indisputable. It’s therefore no surprise that many digital marketing experts say SEO should be a priority for most organizations. While SEO results take time, a high-quality search optimization strategy will eventually deliver more qualified leads and new customers to your business.
SEO helps to build trust and credibility
There are many ways to build credibility and trust for your business online. One of the most important ways is by establishing a strong online presence through SEO.
The benefits of SEO are not just limited to branding and marketing, SEO also helps to improve credibility and builds trust for your business which is a contributing factor to improving customer conversion rates, building brand awareness, and increasing website traffic.
Google ranks websites on a number of different signals, such as the freshness of your content, how well the site responds to mobile visitors and how quickly the site loads, etc.
But most web users don’t really understand or consider how Google comes up with those web results and rankings, they just trust Google’s judgment to deliver the most relevant result per search.
Most people trust the algorithm completely, with over 70% of web users basing their buying decisions only on results shown on the first page. So, for most web users once your business is ranked on Google’s first-page result, you’ve already won half the battle.
This is why it’s important to pay attention to what website design can do for your business, and make sure that your website is optimized properly. Good website design = Good rankings, and Better rankings = More customers = More profitability for your business.
Promote your business round the clock
Search engine optimization efforts go beyond working hours, While the budget for a particular project is not unlimited, content does not tend to disappear after it runs out which is the case when you’re running PPC campaigns.
If you want your business to be promoted round the clock without any additional cost, then your SEO efforts need to be a part of your business’s daily operations.
SEO is a powerful marketing tool that allows your company to reach customers while they’re searching for you. This web traffic can be at any time and from anywhere, meaning you’re not limited to advertising in the physical world.
Optimized User Experience
With SEO, a user is able to find the information they are seeking more quickly. In addition, they are able to find information that they might not have otherwise found. This can be an advantage for people who need to use the internet in a hurry or for those people who are looking for niche information.
SEO supports your marketing funnel
The content marketing landscape is changing rapidly with the rise of SEO. Today, marketers need to create a variety of content types that target every stage of the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, consideration, intention, evaluation, and purchase).
The SEO advantage of the marketing funnel is that it can help in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel. This is because people search for information on a certain topic and they are often directed to a website.
The content on the website needs to be relevant and well-written so that they will stay on your site and find out more about what you have to offer. In the interest stage, SEO can help by getting people interested in your product or service. For example, if you are selling an online course, you might want to put some videos on YouTube about how it works and why people should buy it.
These videos will show up when someone searches for something related to your product or service, which could lead them back to your site where they can purchase it.
At the consideration stage, SEO can help your prospects gain insights into some of the features, benefits, and advantages of using your service or products.
Reach your Target Audience
If you want to position your business to be reached by your entire target audience then SEO is a reliable strategy to achieve that. It works by improving the ranking of your website on search engines so that more people are able to find you. This can be done by building links to your website, creating quality content, and more.
Compete effectively
These days, if you are a small business that wants to compete with larger ones and be seen on SERPs, you need to jump through hoops to get your site seen. by the search engine. This can be a lot of effort and time — time is money, after all! But what if you didn’t have to do any of this work? All you need to do is focus on ONE thing: SEO.
Begin by identifying your competitors, examining their strengths and shortcomings, and building and maintaining a solidified internet presence for your business. Then, make sure that you provide the finest content you can, and concentrate on offering the best user experience.
Boost PPC Campaigns
Unpaid marketing strategies can be hugely beneficial for a company in the long run, but it is difficult to see returns on investment with this method. Paid marketing strategies like PPC can help you reach a wider audience and increase sales. However, it is important to use both types of strategy together as they complement each other nicely.
By appearing first on the search engine result page, your brand will gain more credibility and show that you’re a well-established company that cares about providing quality service.
You can also use SEO to maximize your PPC campaigns, you can complement your best ranking page to make it perform even better by running PPC campaigns to such pages.
Final thoughts
Finally, understand that SEO is not something you do for a few weeks and then forget about it forever. You should be doing SEO on an ongoing basis. This means that you need to keep up with changes in search engine algorithms, new marketing trends, and the latest developments in your industry.
SEO Service in Lagos, Nigeria
Your business is never going to rank high in Google search results if you don’t have an effective SEO strategy in place. And even if you have a strategy, it’s not sustainable without the right guiding principles to support it.
That’s why we recommend using the service of a professional SEO agency to oversee your web positioning. At Web Design Nigeria, we help increase your web traffic, get you more leads, and improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.