We’ve put together a pros list with essentials tips to understand why your business needs SEO in 2020, whether it’s in the future or just in general.
1. SEO Offers Long-Lasting Results for a Business
SEO is a long-term strategy which will bring you long-term benefits. It has a noticeable impact on your business. You probably heard or maybe you’ve asked yourself this question: “How long will it take me to get ranked #1 for my keywords?”. I’ve seen lots of business owners and companies that start doing search engine optimisation and, after a month or two, they just give up and say “SEO doesn’t work” or “We didn’t get the results we needed to justify the cost.”
If you start a new website, it is important to know that you’ll see results in approximately 6 to 12 months. It might seem a big period of time for some, but if done correctly, it will keep your website on SERP and the results you get can last for years. This can have high SEO importance for small businesses that are struggling to succeed.
If you have had a business for some time, then you know how important it is to keep your portfolio and generate conversions. Having search visibility is a great asset for achieving results. SEO can help you by offering visibility in SERP and afterwards with monetary results, but you have to invest in it – time and money.
There are lots of factors that should be taken into consideration when we think about SEO. You need expertise and a feasible plan to achieve SEO success
SEO is and will be a good investment for an online business, which brings us to the next point.
2. You’ll Receive Impressive ROI
SEO brings a great return on investment if you have a healthy budget and an on-going process. Don’t set unrealistic expectations. Budget 6 to 12 months of SEO, otherwise you risk losing money, and you’d better use that budget for something else. Paying for just a few months won’t bring you the results you’re longing about and you’d be like throwing money outside the window.
An investment in SEO is an investment in your business’ future. SEO can bring in about 15 times more clicks than PPC advertising. It is a long-term strategy, as we’ve mentioned before, and it shouldn’t be seen as an immediate way of generating sales. A long-haul plan will bring you a return on investment because SEO is an online marketing strategy with one of the best ROIs.
It might be hard to calculate ROI, but you have lots of analytics you can track and evaluate your goals. Even so, organic SEO is way more powerful than other online marketing tactics, even stronger than paid search ads. SEO is about 5.66 times better than paid search.
The results in the first months of using SEO might be awfully small. But after the 6th month, things start to soar. You’d have to wait until the big leads come pouring, and you’ll need SEO for that.
3. Organic Search Is Often Times the Primary Source of Traffic
Organic search is accountable for a huge part of a website traffic source. Lots of studies strengthen the value of organic search and its importance. Around 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search and only 10% from paid search, 5% for social, and 34% of all other sources.
Search visibility is a great asset and Google owns a significantly larger piece of the search market than competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and other more. We all know the importance of a trusted website; a website that everybody likes is always liked by Google. Quality and constant website optimisation will keep the website as a trusted source by Google and be qualified as a good ranking position on the first page of the search engine results.
There are over 40,000 search queries every second on average on Google, which means 3.5 billion searches per day.
4. SEO Can Be Cheaper Than Other Paid Search Strategies
It can be cheap if we take into consideration a 6-month plan. For SEO you need to invest a lot more money in the first phase, compared to other paid advertising methods where you have to pay from month to month if you want to keep receiving traffic on your website.
Paid search marketing, compared to search engine optimisation, has a shorter time for returning conversion, but your business should invest to see results. As long as you keep paying for results, you’ll get them, which in the long term is not so equitable as SEO.
SEO converts more efficiently, SEM has more speed. Search engine marketing includes every form of paid advertising for your business. Lots of people don’t invest in search engine optimisation because it is expensive at first and desire to look for cheaper alternatives that unfortunately don’t have continuity and stability.
SEO has leverage on improving search engine visibility at a cheaper cost than SEM. The first one is a true investment in your business’ future and not a marketing cost.
5. SEO Is Quantifiable
SEO will provide lots of analytics data for your website. The only struggle you’ll encounter is pulling the data yourself and making decisions for improving your results. It might be a little tricky to understand the data and you’ll have to chew on it more before taking any actions. Any good SEO practitioner will start by finding the rotten data from the pile, which shouldn’t be a big challenge.
There are tools that can help you keep track of your website’s performance. Google Search Console provides data regarding pages that have the best performance, mobile issues regarding your content on-site, indexability.
Google Analytics gives all sorts of data regarding your website and third-party apps if connected. You can see information about:
- your audience: what they like, what they read and so on;
- traffic sources & other channels of collecting users: different websites, paid ads, paid search, social and more;
- viewed content and behavioural actions on site: most clicked pages, particular events.
On top of these two tools, you can opt-in for SEO tools, that show lots of other features such as authority pages, competition ranking, linking situation, on-site errors, duplicate content, slow page speed, content marketing gaps, lack of mobile-friendliness and so much more. Mobile traffic has experienced high growth in the last years. You shouldn’t forget about these elements if you want to grow your business.
A proper way to start would be to make a site audit, then look at the traffic that comes your way and check those pages to see if you need to improve them or redirect the link if the content is obsolete. Next on the agenda would be backlinks evaluation and competitive analysis. So start with on-site technicalities, then move to SEO off-site elements.
6. SEO Offers Credibility and Trust to Your Audience
2020 for sure means trust and credibility more than ever, with the latest migration to HTTPS. That means the goal of SEO should be to build trust and credibility to Google, to the user. User experience and SEO together mean business success. In the old days of SEO, it was simpler to rank by taking all sort of shortcuts. Now, the internet user plays one of the most important roles. You need to know your target audiences very well and to fuel their appeal for your brand to build authority. That way you’ll have the opportunity to quantify your marketing efforts.
Everybody wants traffic, trust, and credibility, but few people really know that UX is involved in this process. If you gain trust and credibility, your website will earn authority, but authority doesn’t come easy. And for that, you need to offer valuable information, have a clean and easy-to-use website. It takes time, patience, effort to make your audience trust your brand and the content you provide. Every business growth needs UX in their lead generation strategy.
Website design such as easy navigation and intuitive site structure are a starting point for creating user-friendly websites. It is very important to have relevant content and description for each section of your menu and every page that you have. Speak the language of the user and don’t try to change the wheel on the natural funnel process otherwise, the user will feel disoriented.
Effective SEO relies on three pillars: authority, relevance and trust. Google has something called the Trust Factor, which is a combination of lots of factors that calculate how trustful a site is. The more trustful a site is, the more likely articles will be ranked higher on Google. A website is considered to be less trustful because it has harmful and/or has low-quality content.
If you want to see how trusted your website is, there are tools that can tell you on a scale from 0 to 100. For example, Majestic Trust Flow is such a metric which is weighted by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain.
7. Voice Search Keeps Growing and You Need Higher Visibility in Search
Voice search has increased tremendously in the last few years. Even studies showed that. Mary Meeker’ annual Internet Trends report shows that voice search queries are now 35 times larger than they were in 2008 (when voice search was launched).
There’s no doubt that voice search has had accelerated growth and will become even bigger in 2020. Lots of brands developed voice search technologies for assistant apps that listen to the user and give audio results based on their queries.
SoundHound, an audio and speech recognition company has found 4 categories of voice search queries:
- Personal assistant: that includes to-do lists, scheduled meetings and all sorts of events, texting, calling on the phone plus other day-to-day activities.
- Fun and entertainment: buying and listening to music, searching movies, TV series and similar actions.
- General information: web search, news, publications, and similar media.
- Local information: searching for restaurants, hotels, and places near-by, traffic jams.
You need to make your audience more aware of your brand and make them hear about you more often. It will help you by raising your brand awareness and get further benefits such as authority, traffic, revenue. When implementing SEO is very important to know your users, to connect with them and make them recognise you by the particularity that you have. This way you’ll be memorable and breed brand recall, so you get more customers to stick with your brand. You need to make them always look and search for you.
8. You Can Push Your Audience Down the Funnel With the Right Type of Content
SEO starts right at TOFU, which is not food. It means the top of the funnel. You might make a correlation with food, and think of it as an appetiser. Because SEO is in the first league, where your audience is. You have to attract a large portion of users right from the start, and then push them down the funnel through the middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU) by using other techniques.
In the first phase of the buying cycle, the user lands on our page and you have to maintain them thereby offering valuable content and useful information. So the process of search optimisation starts with keyword research, understanding your audience, learning their language. There are other technical SEO elements that should be taken into consideration, such as high loading speed, high quality and lossless images, mobile-friendly website, un-broken pages and so on.
9. You Can Get More Customers and More Traffic with Local SEO
If we’re talking about the reasons why you need to invest in SEO, then local optimisation should be on the list. Due to the increase of mobile searches and voice searches, local SEO has started to dominate the SEO trends. Now, it became mandatory for every online business.
Searching for any business location on maps helps the user have more trust and knowledge of your business. It can get to you faster and receive recognition through reviews.
Google My Business is a great way to start your local search engine optimisation process. There you can add NAP (name, address, phone) information and you can connect your website, link a social account, add pictures and a lot more.
For example, you have a restaurant near the stadium in Madrid and one of your customers is visiting the stadium and afterwards decides to eat. Then they look for a place that they like nearby him and end up in your restaurant.
You can use local optimisation for your blog and search for local keywords to include in your articles and also to boost your rankings by targeting top positions in Google. If you are targeting for a specific location, then use the Keyword Tool and Content Assistant, which is very simple and easy. For example, if you are targeting real estate school and your business location is Chicago there are two situations:
- If you want to target only the people from Chicago or who are in Chicago, my recommendation would be to choose the “real estate school” and set the local tracking.
- In case you want to target other cities besides Chicago, you should choose the option to track “real estate school in Chicago” so you’ll see all the searches made from other cities.
10. You Can Get New Opportunities for Your Business
High-quality SEO can bring you lots of possibilities for building a better business and a bigger brand. Not only will you improve your business, but you’ll also make it sparkle.
When people understand your brand due to a quality search engine optimisation process then you reached a new phase in your business growth. If you have a well-known brand, people will search for you, share your content, ask for guest-post and contact you for collaborations. It can become a love mark, a concept that is used when brand loyalty goes beyond reason. And to create a love mark you need great stories that trigger sensorial effects which goes beyond the monitor. It is also important to demonstrate commitment and empathy to the audience.
Conclusion
SEO is an important part of any inbound marketing plan because it helps people find (then share) your content. A business should invest in SEO to get the desired results.
Implementing quality SEO has lots of benefits for your business, no matter how big or small it is. It will always be beneficial to make the most of your SEO and increase the opportunities to grow. Comparing to other paid search tactics, SEO has the guarantee of a long-term relationship. You’ll invest, and get the results for a more extended period. You don’t have to pump money to keep it going. If done correctly, it will go on by itself.
For some further reading, you can research How To Develop a Profitable Digital Marketing Sales Funnel.