Why is SEO Important to Businesses? 17 Vital Growth Tips
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I'm an experienced digital strategist with a track record of working in website design and digital marketing for companies like Bodyfit Nigeria Limited, Dulex Solicitors, Opuforty Nigeria Limited, and others.
Many people still don’t understand why is SEO important to businesses, despite my repeated responses to this issue. We now live in a world where small business owners can compete with large corporations by utilizing Search Engine Optimization, in contrast to the decades prior to the 1990s when the big corporations kept growing while driving the small out of business due to their larger marketing budgets or resources.
In 2022, businesses in Nigeria are beginning to understand the value of SEO for their expansion. I’ll explain what SEO is and what it’s used for just before I go into detail about why it’s vital for businesses;
The process of placing your web pages on search engines like google and bing with the intention of expanding your business is known as?Search Engine Optimization or SEO. ?You can be sure that customers will discover your company here before those of your rivals. Positioning a website highly on the Google search result page is a tactic or approach to get users to it and then stimulate interaction (SERP).
If you have good SEO, potential customers who are searching for your goods or services on search engines like Google or Bing will have no trouble finding you. On a daily basis, Google receives more than 6 billion searches.
When your sites are properly optimized for search engines, this will draw customers who are looking for you on Google and Bing, increasing your search traffic and generating leads and sales.
In light of this, SEO aids business owners in optimizing their dependable and user-friendly websites so that thousands of potential customers can view them.
Is SEO important? SEO is the most practical and economical way for brands to understand and connect with consumers at crucial times.
Many brands and companies are aware of the advantages of having SEO work done on their behalf and the need for it in relation to their digital domains.
What more real benefits does SEO provide outside of increasing a website’s general searchability and visibility?
Why is SEO becoming more and more important in this way? The following are the top 17 benefits of SEO for small business owners:
Table of Contents
The Undeniable Reasons Why is SEO Important to Businesses
1. SEO Has A Higher ROI Than Paid Advertising
Due to its long-term advantages, SEO is cost-effective. A good SEO strategy lasts for a very long time and becomes better the more work you put into it.
When done correctly, SEO makes it easier for clients to locate you even when you’re not around. Your organization can benefit substantially from 2–6 months of SEO effort for over ten years.
Even if SEO doesn’t provide an easy-to-calculate return on investment as paid search does, with the right tracking and analytics, you can measure practically anything.
Since there is no concrete method to understand the correlation between these actions, trying to connect the dots on the back end is a major challenge.
Nevertheless, it is important to comprehend how certain behaviors are intended to impact performance and development—and hopefully, they do.
Putting the pieces together shouldn’t be difficult because any effective SEO will focus on those improvements.
In terms of digital performance, brands also want to know where they have been, where they are now, and where they are heading. This is especially true for SEO when a person or business is being paid to carry out the campaign on the brand’s behalf.
There is also no more effective approach to demonstrate SEO’s effectiveness. We all understand, however, that data is always accurate.
2. Gain Market Share Through SEO
According to search engine algorithms, every company is on an equal footing. To rank on the first page, you don’t directly pay them. Therefore, your chances of attracting major corporations are increased the more effort you put into your SEO performance.
By focusing on a limited following in your immediate area, your small firm has an advantage. As a result, when you optimize your website for local searchers, you see even better results.
Online marketing is extremely dependent on search engine optimization (SEO). Your website’s rating in Google search results can be improved by optimizing it for the proper keywords, raising it to page 1, and bringing in more visitors. The more customers enter your sales funnel, the more opportunities there are to close new business. This is directly related to the number of visitors you have.
As a result, SEO is something you need to invest in if you want to grow traffic, and the quality of your website, and establish credibility, and market share.
There are four strategies to use SEO to grow your market share.
3. SEO Brings More Credibility & Authority
People trust search engines and think they can’t possibly be mistaken;). Therefore, if Google trusts your website enough to rank it highly in search results, people will also trust you.
The majority of website clicks go to companies that are listed first on search engine results pages. Visits to your website rise when you rank highly.
Any skilled SEO expert wants to lay a solid groundwork for a great website with a clear, efficient user experience that is readily found in search engines.
Establishing authority in relation to search engines like Google requires a number of factors:
However, building that authority will benefit a brand more than the majority, if not all, other digital enhancements.
The issue is that, just as in real life, trust and credibility cannot be established overnight. Over time, authority is acquired.
For good outcomes, adherence to Google’s E-A-T standards is essential.
Offering a worthwhile, high-quality product or service that encourages customers to trust a brand is essential to building a business’s reputation as an authority.
4. An Effective SEO Draws Customers
You can see why it is becoming increasingly attractive for small businesses when you consider that, in 2020,?Statista ?found that there were more than 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, with more than 99 million of those users in Nigeria alone. As a result, small business owners have begun optimizing their websites to draw these customers in and entice them to make purchases, read their content, and do other activities.
Any business owner who has a website should have it for one reason: to draw people to it. However, this cannot be accomplished by simply creating a website; instead, it needs to be optimized via search engine optimization.
5. SEO is Cost Effective
You actually need to choose a side in the battle between traditional/conventional marketers and digital marketers in the realm of advertising; else, you risk falling behind.
Due to the high cost of advertising in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, only large corporations could effectively market their goods or services on television, in newspapers, or on billboards. However, as we slowly enter the digital age, a lot has changed. For example, SEO is much less expensive and more effective than billboard, newspaper, outpost, and radio advertising.
When compared to other marketing strategies, SEO is quite cheap, and the benefits to a brand’s bottom line are almost certainly going to be substantial.
This is a genuine investment in the company; it is not a marketing expense.
It will continue to be effective to execute SEO effectively . It will also get better the more attention (and investment) it receives, much like most things in life.
6. A higher conversion rate
Websites that have been optimized for SEO have much higher conversion rates than unoptimized websites, and customers are consistently drawn to these websites through keyword searches. For instance, when someone searched for “how to brew a tea” on Google, the search engine provided many websites and pages to visit. Note* If you don’t optimize your website, people won’t see it when they conduct searches like these.
Local search is now crucial to the success of small and medium-sized enterprises due to the development and dominance of mobile traffic.
Local SEO strives to optimize your online presence for a particular area, making it easier for consumers to locate you and move closer to a transaction.
In order to provide a workable platform for a brand’s messaging on a local level, local optimizations concentrate on certain neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions, and even states.
SEO experts accomplish this by optimizing the brand’s website, its content, local citations and backlinks, and local listings related to the area and industry a brand operates in.
Local SEO experts should start by optimizing a brand’s social network accounts, Knowledge Graph panel, and?Google My Business listing .
Depending on the sector, there should also be a focus on user evaluations on Google as well as other review sites like Trustpilot, Clutch, and?Business List ?(among others ).
7. SEO Is Ideal For Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness is one of the main advantages of working hard to rank highly on Google’s search results page. When you launch a new website, company, or product, your brand is practically unknown to most people. However, implementing SEO on your company website helps to build up the brand, and when people frequently find you on searches, they are more likely to trust your brand and make a purchase from you.
That is why small firms that want to increase brand recognition must start locally and use SEO to expand it to a global level.
Long-term brand equity is increased with the use of SEO. Your brand’s profile is raised with the support of a strong rating and ideal placement.
People look up news and related topics on search engines, thus having a strong SEO and PR plan increases the visibility of your brand.
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Your messages will be heard and your goods or services will sell if your website has a positive user experience.
8. Win The Market With SEO
One person or a small business with two to ten employees cannot compete with a major company with more than 5,000 employees and monthly marketing expenditure in the millions of Naira. You’d be surprised to learn that many large business owners are not tech-savvy and only rely on conventional marketing strategies like billboards, radio, newspapers, etc. They simply cannot compete with that, but they still have an advantage if they start using SEO, which would put them in a favorable position for years to come.
The world is, in fact, moving away from traditional marketing methods and toward digital ones, with a stronger emphasis on search engine optimization.
The Indisputable Benefits of SEO for Businesses
9. SEO is typically the main source of website traffic.
The success of most organizations’ websites is greatly influenced by organic search, which is also essential to the user conversion or engagement process and to the buyer funnel.
Marketers are aware that Google controls a much higher share of the search industry than rivals Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and a plethora of other companies.
That isn’t to say that some search engines don’t help increase a brand’s visibility; they do. Just a sizable share of the whole search industry is owned by Google.
Brands, however, also value the market share that is still controlled by other engines. This is particularly true for businesses operating in specialized industries, where voice, visual, and vertical search engines are crucial.
With more than?1 billion users worldwide , Google, the most popular website in the world (and notably in the United States), also happens to be the most widely used email provider.
Over?2 billion people access YouTube ?monthly, making it the second-largest search engine.
We are aware that the vast majority of people who have access to the internet often search for information on Google.
A brand will always benefit from being widely visible as a reliable resource by Google and other search engines. Brands get there through high-quality SEO and a top-notch website.
10. SEO is the best way to hear what customers have to say.
SEO reveals what customers want and need by helping us comprehend broad market movements and consumer intent in great depth.
We can clearly identify user intent and behavior from SEO data and forms, whether spoken or written.
There are numerous methods in which it accomplishes this:
11. Better User Experience is a Result of Good SEO
Every marketer now places the highest focus possible on the user experience. Everyone aims for higher organic rankings and the broadest exposure. Few people are aware that achieving the best user experience is crucial to getting there, though.
A positive user experience has emerged as a crucial component of a website’s success as Google has learned how to assess favorable or unfavorable user experiences.
Marketers across all businesses will need to abide by?Google’s Page Experience ?Update as part of their ongoing commitment to the consumer experience.
The wants of customers are clear. There will be a problem if they can’t locate it. The performance will also drop.
How Google has evolved to be more of a search engine that provides relevant information right on the SERPs is a perfect example of how to create a positive user experience (search engine results pages).
The goal is to give people access to the information they need with the least amount of effort possible.
Positive user experiences are included in quality SEO, which helps a business by leveraging them.
12. Buying Cycle Influenced by SEO
The relevance of real-time research is increasing as it becomes a crucial component of SEO.
A game-changer will be using SEO strategies to spread the word about your amazing offers, innovative goods and services, and the value and dependability of what you provide clients.
When SEO is done correctly, it will unquestionably have a good effect on the buying cycle as well.
In order to establish a meaningful relationship, brands must be present where consumers are looking for them. With the help of local SEO, this exposure is improved and potential clients may identify the solutions and the companies that are offering them.
13. SEO Provides New Opportunities to Light
High-quality SEO will constantly find a way to locate and take advantage of fresh opportunities for companies to not just be visible but also shine.
SEO personnel must immerse themselves in every aspect of the brand in order to provide exceptional SEO to clients. Being a stakeholder is the only way to truly sell a brand with the love and knowledge that its stakeholders have for it.
A brand will have more opportunities to succeed the more well-known it is. The same is true for SEO.
Today, there are many different ways that SEO may provide new opportunities, from providing content, digital, and social opportunities to assisting with sales, product, and customer service initiatives.
14. SEO will continue to exist.
Brands will always search for the most economical way to satisfy consumer demand for products and services online.
New opportunities are continually emerging through various access points, such as voice, applications, wearables, and the Internet of Things, despite the fact that the role of SEO may alter and methods may change (IoT).
The market value of next-generation search engines driven by deep neural networks and machine learning is expected to skyrocket, rising from $14.9 billion in 2019 to $55.7 billion in 2025, according to Comserve.Inc.
There will always be new organic search chances.
15. With zero-click results, if you’re not on page one, you won’t get the click.
It’s common knowledge in the SEO industry that if your website isn’t on Page 1, you’re probably not dominating organic search.
With zero-click results, if you’re not on page one, you won’t get the click.
As Google’s zero-click SERP places the solution right at the top of search results, SEO is evolving into a zero-sum battle.
The user’s search criteria are met without requiring them to click on any actual search result links.
According to a recent study, the top three organic search results receive more than?50% of all click-throughs , compared to up to?30% of results ?on Pages 1 and 2.
What does this imply? Three items:
16. Understanding SEO Assists in Understanding the Online Environment
It can be difficult to keep up with changes as they happen in the constantly evolving environment of the World Wide Web.
But keeping up with SEO requires being aware of the significant changes that are occurring in search.
For those brands, it is always advantageous to be aware of the online environment, particularly the strategies employed by local competitors and businesses with similar products or services.
17. Best Practices are always updated, and SEO is evolving.
The use of SEO strategies on a brand’s website and other digital properties is excellent. The site will eventually reach a point where it can no longer improve due to other obstacles if it is only a short-term engagement (due to budgetary restrictions, etc.) and isn’t continuously reviewed over time.
To stay ahead of the competition and, ideally, on Page 1, you must constantly monitor for changes in the search landscape, which essentially evolves at Google’s discretion.
Being proactive and keeping an eye out for important algorithm updates will always be advantageous for brands.
We are aware that?Google updates its algorithm ?by thousands every year. It may be challenging to catch up if you fall too far behind.
Pros in SEO work to prevent that.