The benefits of SEO are now so vast that knowledge of it as a principle has become a crucial part of any digital marketing toolkit. Despite the digital marketing terrain changing so quickly and so frequently SEO has sustained its importance and effectiveness, with more business owners than ever now aware that they require it, but in many cases still not fully understanding why. With this in mind, here are just some of the very many benefits that SEO can bring to every and any kind of business with an online presence.

 

Traffic

First and foremost, SEO can provide increased traffic to your site. You could have the best product or service in your industry but if nobody knows you exist, then there is a likely hood that no-one is going to buy, and this is where SEO can come in. When people search for a product or service using Google, 94% of click throughs to a website come from the first page of search results pages shown, and of this number a significant amount of clicks and impressions are achieved by the top three ranking sites on that page, as per the following figures:

  • 1st – 34%
  • 2nd – 16%
  • 3rd – 11%

The second page of search results in total achieves just 6% of the total click throughs, which just shows the importance of ranking on page one at the very least. Furthermore, appearing first in the Google listings can account for one third of all click-throughs made in relation to a specific search term, again generating more traffic and in turn more business.

 

Relevancy

When organised correctly, SEO elements on a website can ensure that everything a company ranks for organically (that is, search terms which are listed highly without the support of paid for adverts, for example) is of relevance to the product or service they offer. An SEO project can also be fine-tuned over time to make the services a website ranks for, more and more specific to what it provides as time goes on. This means that the traffic a site is generating through ranking highly on search engines is always of relevance, and that visitors arriving at your site are people with a genuine interest in what your company offers – because they searched for it!

 

You will get left behind

Make no mistake, businesses in every industry all over the world are investing in SEO and they are all after the number one spot, which as we know takes the lion’s share of online customers. Not completing SEO activities is equal to surrendering this portion of business to your competitors without so much as a whimper – competing and beating must be top of the agenda for any business when it comes to its digital marketing activities. If you’re already the business that’s pulling rank as number one, it’s safe to say all competitors will continually chase that top spot and the importance of maintaining your position must also never be underestimated.

 

In essence, despite first appearing as a somewhat unknown quantity some years ago SEO is now a very specific and measurable process that can have huge returns on investment. It is undoubtedly a lengthy process, and is far from a quick fix when it comes to online issues, but with a well-structured plan and time set aside, SEO plans can be highly effective with the right maintenance and attention in place. SEO is not a service that will achieve overnight success, but in the long run is proving to be much more cost effective than traditional marketing practices, time and time again, with organic search results achieving a 14.6% close rate compared to more immediate processes like Pay Per Click achieving between 3-5%, for example.