Search engine optimization is important for all websites, but for small businesses, it can be especially crucial. With so many businesses competing for the same consumers, showing up in search results is vital.
If you’re still having doubts about SEO and wondering how it can help your business, read on to learn more about its importance.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of strategies that maintain, improve and optimize a website’s search visibility on search engines such as Google, Baidu or Bing. Search visibility refers to how often a website is shown on the search engine result page (SERP) without having to pay for ads.
Typically there are only around 7 organic search results shown on the first page of SERP and layman users don’t usually look past the first page. That’s why the better visibility your website gets, ideally on the first page, the higher attention you get to attract.
To understand how SEO works, you’ll need to first comprehend the 3 key elements that can make or break SEO:
i) Keywords
First and foremost, keywords are the major factor that affects your SEO strategies. Keywords are the word, phrases and sentences that users type in the search engine to search for information. These keywords are powerful as they help users to find and reach your website. With good keyword research and analysis, you will be able to target relevant keywords and rank your website higher.
If you want to learn more about it, read our blog about Keyword Research.
ii) Link Building
Links in search engine’s sense are like votes. They help search engines to indicate how credible is your website. The general rule of thumb is to build links to and from highly rated and credible websites.
There are 3 types of links you could build to improve your website’s ranking:
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Internal links
iii) Content
Keywords ranking and link building are of no use if you don’t have educational and valuable content on your website to attract your customers. Content is where you directly communicate with your prospect, build relationships and potentially convert sales.
Why is it important?
1. Helps build trust & credibility
Users and customers tend to trust websites with the highest ranking on SERP. High rankings do not only mean that you won the bid on a certain keyword, but also refer to the authority you have over that keyword and industry. This indicates that your website has professional and industrial knowledge that is useful to users.
SEO is able to help build trust and credibility organically over time by constantly producing useful and valuable content. When you are able to deliver relevant and educational information to your customers’ search queries, they would trust and visit your website more. Getting more clicks, visits and traffic to your website indicates authority to search engine and hence increase the ranking.
2. Organic search is the primary traffic
Out of all the different kinds of traffic, many brands and businesses found out that organic search is their primary and major traffic. This could be understood as users’ reluctance in clicking on paid ads such as Pay-Per-Click and social media advertisements that direct one to the website.
Organic search or traffic refers to users manually typing certain keywords in search engines. They are users’ voluntary and proactive actions in seeking information, products or places. Therefore, high organic traffic could indicate high sales conversion as the users buying intentions is strong. If you overlook SEO and only rely on social media marketing to drive traffic to your website, you will lose out on a lot of opportunities.
3. Helps to understand customers’ buying behaviour & trends
Through undergoing SEO, brand and business owners are able to interpret and better understand their customers’ voices, questions and buying behaviours. In other words, doing keyword research tells you what your customers are looking for, want, need and intend to buy. This piece of data is crucial in creating content that caters to their needs and attracts them to visit your website.
With the aid of Keyword Planner in Google Ads, you’ll be able to find keywords relating to your industry as well as their search volume. Not only that, but SEO could also help businesses to look out for industry and customer trends.
4. Indicate a good user experience
SEO actually works hand in hand with user experience to increase your rankings on search engines. Factors like page speed, page responsiveness and engagements have a big impact on your website ranking as well. If a web page has a slow loading speed, users will get frustrated and quickly exit the site. This causes a high bounce rate, which indicates that users chose to exit your website instead of staying around and exploring other pages. The higher the bounce rate, the lower the ranking will drop on search engines. Hence, good SEO also indicates a good user experience.
5. Is cost-effective
Since it’s not a pay-per-click or social media advertisement, SEO actually does not really cost much. All it cost is your time to research and strategize your keywords, create relevant and good content and build links to high-traffic websites. The search engine bot crawls 247 around the website and deciphers your content. If your content is helpful and applicable, they would then recommend it to users on SERP. As the population is now more digital than ever, SEO is comparatively more efficient and effective than newspapers or TV ads.
In conclusion, SEO is important for your company’s website because it helps to attract organic traffic. This organic traffic will increase your website’s visibility on its search engine result pages (SERPs), leading to an increase in the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. Nonetheless, it is understandable that not every brand has the manpower to dedicate a team for SEO, hence it is worth seeking the help of SEO experts.
