Benefits of SEO
Create a better and more user friendly website
For starters, SEO will help you create a better, faster and friendlier website for users. Despite the name, search engine optimization is not only about search engines but the focus is on the user. When your users are happy, search engines are happy as well. Following good on-page SEO techniques improves the user experience and this creates a number of short term and long term benefits.
Find new customers and assist growth
If you think about it, one of the main reasons you have a website is to increase and differentiate your customer base. It is a fact that businesses that have a website grow twice as fast as businesses that don’t have a website. SEO will help you gain better rankings in search engine result pages and this translates to more targeted visits and essentially to more customers.
Explore new markets
The web is definitely one of fastest growing markets in World economy but it is not the only one. A successful SEO campaign will help you find new markets and explore new economies. Social media platforms and mobile marketplaces can take your traffic levels to a whole new stage by boosting your SEO performance.
Achieve better conversion rates
An SEO optimized website is fast, easy to use and compatible with mobile and tablet devices. This also translates to better conversions i.e. visitors coming to your website are more likely to become customers, subscribers or loyal visitors.
Build brand awareness through better rankings
One of the hidden advantages of ranking in the top positions of the SERPs is brand awareness. Users are more likely to trust a brand when it appears in the first places when they search for a term rather than brands that don’t have a good web presence. Small businesses that need to build brand awareness (either for local purposes or for expanding nationally) need to invest in SEO and gain top positions for the terms related to their business. This is not the 90’s anymore and search engines play a very important role in building or destroying a brand.
Build a dedicated fan base via newsletter
A good SEO approach means more traffic and a great way to build a dedicated fan base through RSS feeds and newsletter. These two services existed before social media and they are still very important sources of traffic. In fact many successful bloggers claim that most of their money comes from their email lists and not from social media or other medium. So, even if you are working on your social media marketing it is necessary to make it easy for your users to subscribe to your feed and newsletter. What happens in many cases is that websites do have a newsletter box, people enter their emails to subscribe but the website never sends a newsletter out.
Stay in-synch with latest developments
The search engine industry is one of the fastest changing industries in the World. Rules and practices change all the time and if you can stay in-synch with the latest developments then it’s for your benefit. SEO is a continuous activity and if you hire a reliable SEO company they will give you the necessary advice so you won’t miss any opportunities. If again hiring an SEO is out of budget, you can follow me on Twitter and Google+ and I will inform you about everything you need to know.
Bypass competition
Imagine two businesses in the same niche, selling similar products at similar prices. One of them has a search engine optimized website and the other one has a non-optimized web presence. Other things being equal, which company do you think is more successful? Which company will gain more customers from local SEO and which company is likely to grow faster?. Do not underestimate the power of search engines and SEO and don’t forget that if your competitors are doing SEO and social media marketing then you have to do it as well. If on the other hand they are not doing any of this stuff, then it’s your chance to differentiate and make a step ahead.
Your business 24×7
A business that gets organic traffic is like it is open for 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. That’s the magic of the Internet and SEO. Invest time and money to get your website on top of the SERPs and gain new customers while your business is closed!
SEO is good for social media
A webpage with high rankings will also gain more social media exposure. The relationship between SEO and social media is by-directional. Social media popularity is good for SEO purposes and SEO brings more social media visibility. In simple words, searches are more likely to LIKE / Tweet / +1 a page when it is found in the first positions of the search engine results than a page that does not have good rankings.