In today’s competitive world, content plays a strategic role in defining the success of your business.
The quality of your content determines the online visibility of your brand, as well as the user interaction that takes place.
So, what is SEO? What value does it offer to businesses?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become increasingly common among companies who are successfully marketing their products.
SEO boosts up the ranking of the company’s website, which increases the number of users who can see the products online.
It plays a crucial role in improving the perception of your brand among the customers. They will form favorable opinions about your brand by seeing you on the internet with frequency.
With worldwide availability of media and technology, you will find that marketing your brand has become more difficult.
If you can build up competitive edge in any way, you’ll find that it becomes obsolete in very short order.
This is one of the reasons why successful large firms invest heavily in SEO. They find it worth the money to merely improve their brand perception among consumers
Their goal is obviously to increase sales drastically.
Why Businesses Need SEO
Some key reasons why you should invest in SEO to improve your brand are as follows:
1. Improve Your User Experience
Any good SEO professional aims to provide the best possible results to customers.
As a result, they understand that user experience–including web design, content, and more–are crucial to enforcing a positive brand impression with prospects and customers.
For instance, Offer Factor provides a mobile-friendly design and a good integration of photos and videos, so that visitors enjoy a great user experience. This top notch UX leads to high conversion rates and improves brand loyalty.
This is why external factors like usability or website speed play such a key role in ranking.
You might need professional help in order to continuously provide a great user experience. But it’s worth the investment since it should have a positive effect on your revenues in the long run.
A great UX and solid resultant SEO results can really make a difference. Take a look at the example image below from Offer Factor:
Source: Offer Factor
2. Build Your Brand
SEO is all about improving the experience of your customer through web design, high-quality content, user-friendliness, and the overall speed of the website.
So, don’t overlook SEO in your early days with a new business. Take it into account from the very first day, and e sure it is a key piece of your strategy rather than an afterthought you want to add later.
Consumers can only relate to your brand if it fulfills their needs and interests. Otherwise, they will look for other brands without even considering your offering.
Keep top of mind that you need to develop your brand which relates to your audience. Then, you’ll be able to better develop an SEO strategy that supports the brand image that you wish to build.
3. Outrank the Competition
With the internet and wide range of available shopping apps today, people have more options than they know what to do with.
It’s imperative that your brand / website be available and findable when and where customers might be willing to make a purchase.
Competition plays a huge role in marketing strategies being used by companies aiming to give their brand an edge above its competitors.
SEO not only gives an image of your brand being reliable, but it also suggests that your brand is popular on the Internet.
Customers will certainly buy your products if they believe that your quality is higher than that of rival brands.
SEO also helps you stay on top of competitors. You can see where they rank, how they’re pursuing it, and what they are offering potential customers.
This can help you maintain an edge by reacting faster to their actions.
4. Save Money
It is important to know that SEO is cheaper than any other marketing technique, while offering a higher level of effectiveness in developing your brand image.
Search Engine Optimization can help your company attract new customers and ensure customer loyalty, so that you can maintain your market share.
One key alternative to SEO is to high more people on the marketing team. This would obviously increase the costs for salaries and benefits.
But you also have to account for increased marketing spend with those new staff members.
They’ll almost certainly initiate new advertising campaigns, which cost money and could very well fail to increase awareness or sales for your products or services.
This would eventually hurt your brand image and make the company suffer huge setbacks, which may then cost you time to recover.
5. Enhance Your Credibility
One huge benefit of SEO is increased brand credibility. This can in turn boost your sales numbers of your products are of equal quality to that image.
Buyers are extremely loyal to brands that are credible and consistently produce high-quality products.
When your website is highly ranked on a search engine, you should enjoy a favorable impression among the users who visit it.
If the users find your website helpful, then they would give favorable ratings for your website which can further boost up your ranking among other websites.
6. Maximize Brand Visibility
SEO has a significant impact on increasing the visibility of business products on the Internet. This will help you get the products in front of potential customers.
Increased traffic to your website will give you a significant edge over your competitors. Not only will potential buyers hve easy access to product information, but they should begin trusting your brand as reliable.
With increased brand visibility, buyers are more likely to prefer it over other rivals.
Want to know how customers are most likely finding you? Here’s what Conductor discovered to be the typical mix for a “well-oiled” digital marketing website.
Source: Search Engine Watch
When visitors perceive your brand as highly reliable, you can enjoy a domino effect where rivals are seen as less reliable. This could very well decrease demand for their products and services in comparison.
7. Increase Traffic
According to a study cited by BlueCorona.com, 57% of B2B marketers revealed that SEO helps generate more leads than any other marketing initiative. Clearly, if it is generating a greater number of leads, then SEO is driving more traffic!
SEO will not only increase your traffic. It will also ensure that potential customers are paying attention to your brand.
This will lead to an increase in the conversion-to-sale ratio on your domain, reducing the likelihood they will move on to compare competitor’s offering to yours.
Through inbound marketing, more quality traffic can be directed to your website. This will eventually lead to an increase in the number of sales and enhance your position among competing brands.
Source: Forbes
As your brand grows and begins to capture market share, higher traffic will naturally lead to a growth in revenue.
8. Eliminates or Reduces Spend on Ad Space
One of the several advantages of SEO is that it does not involve you paying for ad space.
It is unlike traditional advertising, where you need to pay for the ad to appear where you want for some pre-determined length of time.
As soon as that length of time is over, your ads will stop running. The faucet is completely cut off.
Think about how many online advertisements you see on a daily basis. Most of those advertisers have accepted the idea that advertising is an ongoing expense, without options.
Fortunately for them, they only pay when the ad is clicked for search engine driven ads. But they are paying to be atop the SERP nonetheless.
With SEO, you can get on page 1, where most of the clicks happen, without paying for every single click. Invest the time and money up front and enjoy the lower cost benefits of organic traffic in perpetuity!
Conclusion
To sum it up, SEO is essential to creating a strong online presence for your brand, especially when competition is so tough these days.
As a brand, you want to have a strong connection with your consumers. Showing up on relevant searches is the key to getting in front of your audience and connecting with them.
Whether your business is online and offline, SEO should be a key ingredient in your marketing mix. As we just illustrated, the benefits of SEO are extensive, so go pursue that ranking!
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from Pexels.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Megan Dennis
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