SEO: Why It's A Must For Your Company

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of optimising a website or individual web pages for it to rank on search engine platforms when using highly-targeted keywords.?

?

Marketers have long learned that plainly having a website does not guarantee that their company’s products and services will receive the traction it achieves to gain. The backend SEO work is essential in order to cast the net wider and potentially reach a larger audience that hopefully will turn into paying consumers.?

?

Organic Search vs Advertisements

Arguably an easier approach to reach a wider audience would be through ads. With a competitive budget put in place, a company can create an advertisement, set the location it aims to capture, target a specific age group, and specify the keywords, among many others.? With ads put in place for a longer duration, a website may gain more visitors and a brand may eventually have more visibility. However, as ads will involve a budget specifically allocated to cater for regular ad posting, this strategy might not be practical for smaller businesses.

?

This is where the beauty of organic search comes in. A more cost-effective way of targeting an audience, through the use and practice of consistent SEO, a company’s website or specific web pages may then appear on the first page of a search engine once information about their products or services are searched for online.

?

SEO plays a big role in creating a good organic result for a brand. Organic search and SEO go hand-in-hand with the latter helping with the success of the former.

?

How does SEO work?

With the use of “robots”, search engines get to crawl through websites and each individual webpage to understand every photo, word, and detail on every webpage of that domain name. The pieces of information it has absorbed are then indexed.

?

Once a user searches for something online, the algorithm then matches the user’s query to the relevant information it has indexed.

?

There are two methods to implement SEO; On-Page SEO and Off-page SEO. Most marketers would know better than choose to just do one as both serve a unique purpose and drive different kinds of results. On-page SEO refers to anything done directly on the website; graphics, blogs, and overall content. And Off-Page SEO includes social media content, and external links, among others.

?

How does SEO help?

?

Aside from SEO effectively being the more cost-effective approach in getting your brand or company name out there, it also gives a multitude of other benefits.

?

1. It creates credibility for your brand

?

Users often consider brands and companies that rank high on search engine results as more credible and established. There was a joke on the internet before that said, “The best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of a Google Search”, and this speaks volumes about consumer habits and how online users perceive the first page of a Google search result. More often than not, users key in a keyword and upon scrolling through the first page of results, key in another keyword slightly similar or close to the previous keyword to hopefully generate a new set of results.

?

With proper, effective, and consistent SEO efforts put in place, your brand has a higher chance of appearing on the first page of a Google search when using your chosen keywords, helping to strengthen your brand name.

?

2. It helps you reach your target audience plus more

?

Unlike Pay-Per-Click Ads where you focus on the demographics you want to target, SEO is more keywords-centric, hence allowing you to reach more potential customers, regardless whether they match the demographics of your target audience. This may potentially widen your target audience and introduce you to certain demographics that you did not know you can sell your products and services to.

?

3. Strong Local Presence

?

When searches do not involve a specific region, search engines offer them local results, hence making it essential that you have your business details clearly stated on your website.

It will be wise to have a Google My Business account setup, reflecting your business’ contact details (i.e. website, office number, physical office address, social media handles, and all other means for contacting you). That partnered with positive reviews coming from your clients would be an effective way to optimise your website and potentially get more online visitors converted into paying customers.

?

With your business information properly detailed on your Google My Business account, users who search for a certain keyword that is related to the products or services you offer may then get your company as one of the first few results.

?

4. It’s more cost-effective

?

As mentioned earlier, the biggest difference between SEO and PPC ads would be that the latter requires a budget, and depending on the keywords you choose, it may require a steep budget.??

?

SEO then provides a cost-effective way to reach a wider audience without breaking the bank. It provides an easy, accessible, and sustainable method of getting your brand name, your products and services out there.

?

5. Increases Lead Generation

?

Almost everyone goes to the internet to search for a piece of information. With an optimised website, the indexed information about your brand, products, or services can reach more potential clients.

?

When user experience is factored into your website; clean interface, intuitive buttons, attractive photos, together with clear and straightforward messaging, SEO optimisation runs much smoother.

?

Google now recognises not only keywords embedded inside the website, but also takes into factor the overall user experience on every webpage of your company site. It now tries to understand web pages instead of mere keywords on the website.

?

With an easy-to-digest website, your company may then rank higher on Google results, which will then inevitably provide you with more leads.

?

SEO may be overwhelming at the beginning and may look like it requires a lot of work. That is why more and more companies will either have an in-house dedicated team or external partners to take care of its planning, execution, and analytics of SEO. If you are looking for a team to handle your website optimisation, UX/UI, visit us at www.pivottree.com.sg and get a free consultation now!