Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the process that helps websites appear on the top of the search result in popular search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing, and so on. 

By ensuring that your business’s website is at the top of results when people search for relevant topics, you can count on plenty of exposure for your business, thus increasing your business’s popularity. Although many business owners think they know the benefits of SEO, not many people fully grasp its importance. 

There are plenty of detailed guides on how to do this such as HigherVisibility's beginner’s guide to SEO. To help make things clearer, here are 11 reasons why you should use SEO as a marketing strategy.

1. Get More Traffic

Let’s be honest, it’s very rare for people to go past page 2 of search results when looking for information on search engines. For that reason, if you ensure that your business’s website page is at the top of the list of search results, you can be certain that more people will visit your website. In other words, the higher your website ranks for keywords, the more people you’ll have visited your website.

Bear in mind that organic search is a major part of the most businesses’ website performances. Since people visit search engines such as Google all the time, being visible on such a search engine will work highly in your business’s favor. According to statistics, if you rank in the top results of a search engine, every 100 times a term related to your website is searched, you will receive about 27 visitors. So, the higher you are in search results, the more traffic you’ll get in your website, the more popular your business will get.

2. Build Trust and Credibility

Building credibility for your business is a hard task that can’t be done overnight. In the business realm, authority is built over time. It’s important to note that establishing authority and building the trust of potential customers takes plenty of effort and a lot of patience. In all truth, websites that appear at the top of search result lists are seen as more believable and trustworthy. This occurs because, nowadays, people think that websites at the top of the list are the most prominent.

Additionally, building trust relies on raising your consumer awareness of the quality of your product. Usually, the end goal of a well-developed SEO is establishing a healthy foundation for your website by making prospective customers aware of your business’s potential. By keeping your business’s name at the top of search results, you can be sure to establish credibility and the trust of your customers.

3. Better User Experience

It’s important for every business to have good organic rankings and visibility. What most business owners don’t realize is that optimal user experience is one of the best ways to reach those goals. SEO is a powerful tool when it comes to optimizing user experience, since it uses many metrics that tell you more about the people that visit your website. It’s important to learn how to interpret user experience, since a positive the user experience is essential to a website’s success. Not only does SEO give you information about the demographics, locale, and interests of your visitors, but it can also let you know where the website user is standing in their decision-making process.

Know that customers always have something in mind when going through a website. If they can’t find it, it’s going to pose a problem and performance will suffer. Quality SEO considers positive user experience, thus working in the brand’s favor. The whole point of good SEO is that it helps users find the information they need easily, quickly, and in fewer clicks.

4. Cost Effective

In comparison to other, more extravagant forms of online marketing, SEO are actually incredibly cost-effective. Other forms of online marketing such as social media marketing, PPC advertising, and email marketing tend to cost much more money for more or less the same results. Even though SEO is a process that takes a longer time to develop, it’s an investment that will definitely pay off as time passes.

Although PPC may allow lots of revenue into your business, and social media may better your business’s overall image, having proper SEO will always be the foundation of your online presence. Once enough effort has been placed on developing your SEO, you will begin to reap its long-term benefits. The number of people using search engines nowadays is at an all-time high, meaning investing in SEO is the best chance you can take on your business.

5. Match Your Competition

While it’s important, being on the top of search results isn’t the end of the road. You need to keep in mind that your competition also constantly strives to be on the top of search results. Your work isn’t over as soon as you reach the top of the lists. Once you’re up there, you still need to continue to work in order to maintain your place at the top. If you want your business to continue to grow, you need to continuously invest in SEO, in order to ensure your business’s online survival among competitors.

Additionally, if you completely ignore your SEO, you’re practically giving your spot up to your competition without a fight. If you’re not properly focused on maintaining your status, your competition will quickly get to your spot. In fact, with the use of proper SEO, small businesses are outranking larger one on search engines. This just proves that, with the right tactics and procedures, you can make your business succeed.

6. Impact on Your Buying Cycle

One of the biggest advantages of online marketing and SEO from the buyers’ perspective is that customers everywhere do their research. For that reason, you can use SEO tactics to introduce customers to your products, spread your deals, and show consumers the dependability of your business. By doing that, you will undeniably impact your businesses buying cycle positively. 

By making your brand visible where customers need it, you’ll be able to connect with your customers and increase your productivity. SEO helps you enhance your visibility, helping customers find your website. Furthermore, incorporating SEO into your marketing plan makes each page on your website an entry point for potential customers, making it more likely for them to choose your business for the products they need. 

7. It Will Last for a Long Time

It’s apparent that search engines have developed recently. Consequently, it’s very likely that SEO will continue to be effective for a long time in the foreseeable future. SEO will continue to grow, and thus it’s important to keep it at the top of your business strategy. According to Business 2 Community, companies nowadays spend around 79 Billion dollars on SEO development. Furthermore, SEO techniques can only evolve from this moment on, making investing in them so much more worth it. 

At some point in the future, even video and audio searches will depend on keywords, as much a text-based content. As a matter of fact, in today’s day and age, about 93% of people looking for products or services do so using search engines. In fact, the number of pure Google searches has continually increased in the past decade.This only goes to show the importance of SEO for your business’s popularity.

8. Acquire Monthly Traffic

The higher you are on the search result list, the more targeted traffic and organic traffic you’ve come to your website. This will increase the revenue you get on your business’s website, making your return on investment, or ROI, worth it. After all, traffic coming into your website from SEO is free, and so receiving consistent, targeted traffic to your website will ultimately cause your sales to skyrocket. 

By retaining the traffic you receive from your SEO, you will be sure to get a set amount of traffic on your website on a monthly basis. Since this happens with virtually no expense at all, you will reduce your acquisition costs.This could lead to you gaining more trust from your customers, getting more sales, in addition to more shares on social media. Luckily for all those who invest in SEO, social media and SEO work hand in hand. The better your SEO tactics, the more popular you’ll get on social media, the better your visibility.

9. Generating High-Quality Leads

While it may not seem like it, one of the greatest perks of SEO is that people only find your business if they want to. This means your business’s website only shows up when people are looking for the product or service related to your business. This ensures that you get a targeted audience for your product. Furthermore, SEO can help you maintain an ongoing relationship with your customers.

Additionally, it’ll cause you to pay attention to keeping your contents and products equivalent to what customers are looking for. By having high-quality leads, you’ll be sure to have more people visiting your website. Once you have knowledge of the kind of products or information your customers are looking for, you’ll be able to create content that answers your customers questions. If you plan your SEO strategy correctly, you will ensure the long-term success of your business, as well as an ongoing relationship with your consumers.

10.  Bring New Opportunities to Light

Good quality SEO will always give you a chance to find new opportunities to be discovered and reach your business’s full potential. In order to make sure you have decent SEO, you need to completely submerge an SEO team in the brand. If done right, SEO can also bring about a great amount of sustainability to your business. If you maintain a top position in search results, you’ll be creating new opportunities for your website, which mean you’ll maintain a consistent traffic flow. 

Proper SEO is the only way to market your brand with passion and understand the points of view of the brand’s stakeholders. The better your product or brand is understood, the more opportunities you’ll have, and the better your business will thrive. The same can be said about your SEO; the better it is, the more your business will thrive.

11.  Better your Content Profile

Not having a healthy content profile can actually prove dangerous for your business. Search engines have been updating and changing their search algorithms consistently. This means they change the way they look at websites, making things a lot different than they were. 

Things like social media indicators, which didn’t exist a few years ago, have become an important part of a website’s rankings. The consistency of your business name, phone number, and address, as well as its social media profiles, is incredibly crucial for your business’s credibility.

Since a healthy content profile has become one of the factors search engines evaluate when looking at a website, it’s important to make sure your website’s content profile is well-adjusted. If your website has conflicting information out on the web, it’s going to be difficult for search engines to know what data to trust. By applying local SEO to your website, you can ensure that customers find the right information on they need to contact you.

So Should You Use SEO to Market Your Business?

The answer is: yes. Investing in a strong, good-quality SEO is more important to your business than you think. Despite the difficulties people face regarding the lack of organic data and traffic, good SEO on your brand’s website is always going to be beneficial to your business’s marketing efforts. Whether you decide to do it for yourself or hire a professional SEO service company, you’ll be sure to gain many of the aforementioned benefits.

Any business looking for a durable online presence needs to implement SEO in order to succeed in terms of online marketing. As available online data and competition continue to grow, SEO has become critical to a brand’s web presence. SEO is now considered a “new age” marketing technique, and it remains one the most important constituents of a business’s branding and marketing efforts.