What can you do if you have a business website that looks great but is not visible to your customers and if your competitors seem to steal all the limelight?
There are many options available for online marketing and advertising. Most advertising solutions will cost you to pay for every click you receive on the website.
The benefits of SEO services, on the contrary, are multifarious. It is the most cost-effective online marketing tactic to help bring the most relevant people to your website.
You will surely want your website to come in the top search results, as 75% of internet users only go up to the first page. The first five organic results account for 67.60% of all clicks, so you can imagine the most prominent market potential and what are the benefits of SEO. Also, 46% of all searches on Google are for local businesses. This is how SEO benefits for businesses and requires online exposure. Moreover, out of all these local searches, 28% result in a purchase. It is apparent from the above facts that SEO is one of the best ways, and the advantages of SEO include making your website visible for the longer-term and growing your business.
Your website’s SEO success depends on the strategy and the marketing team’s approach, where it strictly needs to stick to white hat techniques, or the website will vanish. But, following the right procedure, the results you get after SEO is worth satisfying where you stand a chance to drive a 14.6% conversion rate.
You might be interested to know the SEO process we follow at EvenDigit.
Here are the advantages of SEO in digital marketing.
1. SEO improves your business ROI
2. SEO builds trust and credibility
3. SEO drives high-quality traffic to your website
4. SEO measures success with real numbers
5. SEO targets every stage of your buying funnel
6. SEO increases brand awareness among high-value shoppers
7. SEO generates more leads, sales, and market share for your business
8. SEO maximises the success of your PPC campaign
9. SEO helps you outrank your toughest competitors
10. SEO addresses all types of the target audience
11. SEO drives long-term success for you
12. Top SEO rankings provide 24/7 promotions
13. SEO influences purchasing decisions
14. SEO can increase your website referrals
15. SEO drives offline sales
16. SEO can give smaller businesses an edge over larger companies
17. SEO will help you gain market share
18. SEO will help you break into new markets and opportunities
19. SEO will increase your social media followers
20. SEO improves the safety and security of your website
21. SEO helps in user engagement
Now, Let’s dig deeper to understand the importance of SEO for small businesses
1. SEO improves your business ROI
Marketers generally claim that SEO is the best investment to grow your business because of the advantages of SEO optimisation, but how? Google is the largest traffic driver and can help businesses drive more traffic than any other online platform. And your website stands a better chance for increased ROI. But why are we saying this?
SEO increases the visibility
High visibility = high click-through rates
High click-through rate = more traffic
More traffic = more leads
More leads = higher conversion
Higher conversion = higher ROI
“ROI = (Customer Lifetime Value – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment”
Key performance indicators to consider for evaluating the benefits of SEO services:
• Your keyword position ranking as compared to your competitor.
• Organic and local SEO traffic.
• Conversions include calls, forms, subscriptions, email addresses of customers, queries, and purchases.
• Exit pages which are reflected by a high bounce rate
• Visitor quality, including pages per visit, conversion, and bounce rate.
• Domain authority to gauge self-improvement or competitive measurement.
• Impressions for brand recognition,
• Referral traffic through links built for SEO
But from where do you get these?
Run a conversion report through Google Analytics, and you will get a list of conversions along with their value in terms of revenue. Compare these values with your SEO investment in a specific period, and you will get the ROI.
2. SEO Builds Trust and Credibility
From using targeted keywords, and adding links, to crafting great shareable content, SEO builds credibility and trust in multiple ways, which takes time. This trust and credibility let people come to your website for more information. You must take care of certain factors essential to building credibility online. The important considerations include the following:
Create useful and quality content and maintain the frequency.
• Always remain active in your community and join conversations to provide handy inputs.
• Use the About Us section of your website to show off media publications where your business has been featured.
• Provide your customers with a platform to voice their opinion by creating a separate page.
• Embed Google Maps on your Contact Us page to give your customers instant attention.
3. SEO drives high-quality traffic to your website
Regarding the benefits of SEO for website, it is not only about increasing traffic on your website. Instead, it is about driving targeted and quality traffic on your website. Another advantage of SEO for business growth is that it helps drive quality traffic, improving your website engagement and conversions. A mix of channels works to drive traffic. It includes online directory listing, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and your website.
You should focus on three critical elements to drive targeted traffic to your website:
• Keywords- Include long-tail and location-based keywords in your content, meta descriptions, and header tags.
• Content- Write fresh, clean, well-researched, and long-form content; the ideal length to rank on Google is 2416 words. Here you have the margin to interlink your content with what’s written in the past.
• Off-Page SEO- Your website gets a top position based on the number of unique domain names linking to your website content. This indicates the number of site owners who are referring to your content. You can also achieve this by guest blogging.
A great SEO strategy, including high-quality content and link building, can help you rank your website.
4. SEO measures success with real numbers
When we talk about successful numbers and the benefits of SEO for small businesses, it is important that you should know what’s working for your website and whatnot. Well, numerous factors contribute to the success of a website. It could improve traffic, leads, conversions, and improved keyword positions. If you see improvements in all of these, it indicates that you have tasted success.
Let us explain this, with our own success here:
One of our clients, facing challenges with a poor keyword strategy, less website content, and zero backlinks, got 20,000+ organic visits with SEO in just five months.
To know how our SEO team helped the business to reach the next level. Also, we rank at number one for being the “best SEO company in Indore“.
Also, we are ranking at number one for being the “best SEO company in Indore“.
5. SEO targets every stage of your buying funnel
When we talk about the buying cycle, there is an ideal flow to it. The flow starts with awareness, where people come to your website and recognize your brand. They get aware of your business, and as they find it useful and relatable, they act where they become your subscribers and make a final purchase. SEO impacts the complete buying cycle as marketers relay messages for pretty good deals, some cool products and services, and the USP of the product. And to amplify the message, they include targeted keywords which, when clicked, imply user interest that leads to final purchase. It is a game-changer in the long run. SEO targets the right visitors at every step of the buying funnel, whether it is awareness, research, consideration, or customer loyalty, ultimately increasing sales. It is of the great importance of SEO for small businesses
6. SEO increases brand awareness among high-value shoppers
When we talk about building your brand, it depicts your brand image, which reflects your user’s idea of what he thinks of your brand. Your website content plays a major role in creating a specific brand image. SEO helps to create useful and attractive content according to the latest algorithms. Google rolled out a recent update called BERT sometime ago. The idea behind the update was contextual clarity and delivering relevant results.
SEO helps to clear ambiguity in your content so that users can easily read and understand, which attracts high-value shoppers to your site. Moreover, SEO helps to enhance the site design, utility, and accessibility, making your customers feel good about your brand and recognizing your brand in a positive light.
7. SEO generates more leads, sales, and market share for your business
SEO benefits for business, when optimised the right way, show your content in the top results, exposing your business to targeted users. It is one of the benefits of SEO services for your business. Your audience and customers get aware of your products and services and figure out whether the stuff you offer can solve their purpose or not. He picks the right solution when he finds that his problems are addressed on your website. Lastly, he evaluates his decision and makes a purchase.
But how do you reach the targeted audience so that you have more leads and sales?
• Using more targeted and local keywords will help drive more traffic, generating more leads, sales, and market share.
• Optimise your home page and the inner content of your website.
• Registering your business in online directories to get more qualified visitors.
• Build an active blog and create converting content copies for it consistently, which is useful for your customers and add relevant links to it to build authority.
Figure out the number of leads you can generate from SEO for your business.
8. SEO maximises the success of your PPC campaign
When worked together, SEO and PPC can give tremendous results as the efforts are to increase traffic and visibility and generate leads. Both strategies will complement each other. You can use PPC to refine your keyword strategy. You can identify the most converting targeted keywords and use them in your SEO strategy. You will get effective feedback, and then you can fine-tune your strategies. Moreover, optimizing the website’s landing page enhances the user experience because of the relevant content that includes targeted keywords. This way, you can also improve the relevancy score of your PPC campaigns.
9. SEO helps you outrank your toughest competitors
As you focus on the targeted audience and use targeted keywords to drive traffic in SEO, you will discover different market segments to improve your visibility, traffic, leads, and conversions. All these segments give you millions of opportunities to beat your competitors, where you can create compelling content copies to lure your customers.
Moreover, when you start your keyword research, you tend to spy on your competitors to know their ranking keywords so you can remodel your keyword strategy to outperform them. You need to ensure that the keywords you choose should be based on the higher search volume, profitability, and keyword difficulty.
Apart from this, when you use online tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs, you get a list of backlinks your competitors share, which helps them rank. You can follow back those relevant links that your competitors are sharing. This way, you can outrank them and reap the benefits of SEO services.
10. SEO addresses all types of the target audience
SEO starts with your business understanding, where it is important to know your audience to develop a smart and targeted strategy. It includes important factors like gender, age, range, ethnicity, income level, interest, and attributes.
Your audience could be at multiple selling points such as email, social media, websites, e-commerce sites, and other mediums. SEO helps to identify every member of your targeted audience by:
• Collecting responses from feedback forms you have on your website
• Sending follow-up surveys
• Collecting demographic information when a customer makes a purchase
11. SEO drives long-term success for you
SEO is beyond generating traffic that gives your business a new lease on life; otherwise, you will be shoved in this ultra-competitive market. It takes time to rank your website, and the benefits of SEO services you reap are far more stable and satisfying.
12. Top SEO rankings provide 24/7 promotions
Google tends to show your site 24×7 as soon as you get visibility. 80% of people research any product online before buying. Since your website is showing up daily, you can easily earn passive leads and revenue without getting into the hassle of calling your customers and attending to each one of them.
13. SEO influences purchasing decisions
As you know that SEO reaches your customers at every stage, and it has the potential to influence the entire buyer’s journey from awareness to building customer loyalty. SEO works on the principle of pull marketing, where it attracts your customers based on authority, credibility, and meaningful and helpful interactions.
Since SEO focuses on delivering value, it is an essential factor that builds your brand online, where everything is optimized throughout the buyer’s journey. Therefore it influences a buyer’s purchasing decision, making it apparent that it is a smart investment.
14. SEO can increase your website referrals
If you need to know what referral traffic is, visitors coming to your website from another source are called referral traffic. It is important from the ranking perspective and the benefits of SEO services. When a user comes to your website, he completes a social activity by clicking on your links, which are considered positive by Google because they come from a trusted website.
But how can you enjoy more referral traffic?• You need to publish your website to online directories from where you will generate some quality traffic.
• Also, publish your website on the review website to spread awareness about your brand.
• You can also use social media by posting your website links to get referral traffic, as your business stands a higher chance of getting referral traffic, according to 89% of marketers.
15. SEO drives offline sales
Today’s path to purchase goes from device to voice search to online stores and back again, giving you ample opportunity for offline conversions. You can add call extensions to your website, update Google My Business, and create geo-specific content.
A call to business indicates strong purchase intent on the part of your customers,’ make it easy for them to call you and believe us, it will drive insane call conversions. Moreover, two-thirds of smartphone users purchase from online stores customized to their locations. You can create content that calls out the geographic location of your business; it will help you drive converting traffic. Include your location details in the meta descriptions, headlines, and content body. Also, use images specific to the location of your business. These all also come into local SEO optimization.
16. SEO can give smaller businesses an edge over larger companies
Google has started ranking your content at position zero, called snippets that appear at the top of all search results. It contains a direct answer to a search query. People are searching for direct answers that address their concerns, so make sure you answer those queries.
If you optimise your content for featured snippets, you can outperform big competitors in the market, as featured snippets are more attention-grabbing. Include a paragraph of 45 words that convey the message.
17. SEO will help you gain market share
In SEO, market share means online space where websites rank, and SEO helps to gain better market share when your website has a higher tendency to appear. All the users visiting your website are considered your leads, and when they feel their issues are being addressed, they may turn into loyal customers.
Well, it increases website conversions, where you enjoy a larger market share where customers will either make a purchase or sign up for your memberships. This way, you have a more massive revenue contribution in the overall earning online, which indicates that you enjoy a large market share.
18. SEO will help you break into new markets and opportunities
You will be surprised that there are 40,000 searches every second and 3.5 billion searches daily. So, you can imagine the huge potential the online market has, and SEO helps to break the ice.
As the market is getting insanely competitive, businesses need to figure out shoulder niches to survive in the market where SEO plays a crucial role. If you need to know what shoulder niche is, then it is the topic related to your main subject around which you can create a robust content library to lure the audiences. It is undoubtedly going to create new opportunities for your business.
You need to focus on backlinks to find more shoulder niches, which will expose you to different audiences from the traffic coming from other sites. As you address various concerns, people find it appealing and feel assured that their concerns are being addressed. This way, you avoid direct competition from the big brands and target their audience, which opens doors to new opportunities.
19. SEO will increase your social media followers
Likes, comments, and shares are the most important actions in SEO. Well, it revolves around a great piece of content you write for your website that your audience finds useful. As you post it on social media, it gets shared by everyone, and therefore you get more opportunities for your website to enhance reach and improve visibility. This is how SEO benefits for businesses, as people tend to notice your content, which helps you increase your social media followers.
20. SEO improves the safety and security of your website
40% of Google’s page one organic search results feature an HTTPS site as it is more secure. Moreover, in 2014 Google announced security as a ranking factor. Let’s see what Google has to say:
Since then, marketers and SEO specialists started giving weight to security. This way, SEO includes the security feature in your websites and makes it safe for browsing, which is another advantages of SEO.
Moreover, when a customer would visit your online store, you can give your users safe and secure browsing experience. It will enhance customer loyalty and builds authority in the long run.
21. SEO helps in user engagement
When it comes to user engagement, writing awesome content will not get you higher rankings alone. You will also need to consider some of the important metrics in SEO. These metrics include high rankings resulting in traffic, lesser bounce rates, more page views, more brand mentions on other high domain authority websites, increased dwell time on your website, and much more.
If your website has all of these, then it stands a better chance of attracting audience attention and enjoying the benefits of SEO services. Moreover, if your website design is attractive, easy to navigate, and loads in less than 2 seconds, you will have more user engagement and the advantages of SEO rankings.
Summary:
The list of advantages of SEO in digital marketing and benefits of SEO for small businesses can go very long and is not limited to only these 21 advantages of SEO. If you are facing challenges growing your business, start optimizing for search engines. People are more likely to find you on the internet.
Contact us if you are also looking forward to creating a sustained online buzz around your business. We at EvenDigit will help you promote brand recall with SEO. Our team of 70+ professionals who have a record of working for 50,000+ hours will work dedicatedly to help you grow your business online.
EvenDigit
EvenDigit is an award-winning Digital Marketing agency, a brand owned by Softude (formerly Systematix Infotech) – A CMMI Level 5 Company. Softude creates leading-edge digital transformation solutions to help domain-leading businesses and innovative startups deliver to excel.
We are a team of 70+ enthusiastic millennials who are experienced, result-driven, and hard-wired digital marketers, and that collectively makes us EvenDigit. Read More