A total of 68% of all online experiences. That’s how much influence search engine traffic has in the online world. The question is, have you started the process of optimizing your site to take advantage of search engines?
If you haven’t decided to invest in SEO strategies to grow your website audience, this post will help you make that decision. Below are seven benefits of SEO that make it worth the investment.
1. Save Money
It’s expensive to drive paid traffic to your website every day. Paid ads are more costly than they have ever been. As time goes on, competition is also likely to increase those prices even more.
You can avoid bidding wars by taking advantage of free traffic with SEO for small businesses. Instead of investing in ad clicks, you invest in content for your website.
Your content is often a one-time expense. Once your articles are live on your site, Google will find them and rank them in its search engine.
Of course, you’re going to play a waiting game with search engine traffic. However, once you’re on the first page of Google, you can take advantage of free traffic without paying for any other traffic sources.
2. Find People in Buying Mode
One of the problems with other traffic sources is that you’re reaching out to people who aren’t in a buying mood. Social media, for instance, is filled with people scrolling through their news feeds. Most of these people aren’t ready to buy from your website.
With off-site and on page SEO, you can target buying keywords. These keywords use modifiers that indicate that the people searching with them are ready to buy a product.
You can skip much of the customer journey in this situation. Instead, you can use your web pages to tell those people that your products and services are the ones worth buying.
3. Improve Website Performance
Once you dig into the SEO basics, you’ll start to notice how your site performance impacts your rankings. Searchers expect the sites they visit to load quickly. If you don’t provide that experience to them, they’ll go back to the search results and visit the next website on the list.
Google wants its users to have a great experience, so it tracks the bounce rate on your website. If it’s too high, there’s a higher chance that people aren’t finding the information they’re looking for.
That’s why a big part of on-site SEO is improving your website speed. This won’t only help your search rankings, either. Every visitor from all your traffic sources will get a better experience.
4. Find the Right Audience
Even if you’re an expert in your industry, it’s not always easy to figure out who your target audience is. If you rely on paid traffic, this means investing in many tests to determine your best demographics. One of the significant advantages of SEO is that your target audience finds you.
Since you’re writing articles that target questions people in your industry ask, there’s not as big of a need to hone in on your target audience.
As you get more customers from your search traffic, you’ll learn more about the people who buy from your company. You can start changing your brand voice as you get more data to help your SEO content convert more visitors to customers.
5. Improve Your Brand
It’s harder to build trust with your customers when you aren’t well known. If people have to scroll through pages of search engine results to find your website, do you really have much authority?
SEO will improve your brand’s perception by putting your website on the first page for many keywords. For many search engine users, having high search engine rankings means that your website is of higher quality than your competitors.
Being on the front page also makes your brand visible to magazines and other high-profile websites. Your brand gains a lot of value when other high-profile people talk about and recommend it. If these organizations’ owners find value in your brand, you can gain traffic and customers from them.
6. Improve Your Social Media Marketing
SEO isn’t the only form of free traffic you can take advantage of. While there is a lot of benefit to paid advertising on social media, that doesn’t mean you have to go the paid route. You can still build a company page and organically drive traffic to your social media accounts.
The question is, do you have good enough content to grab the attention of social media users? You can use your SEO content to provide social media users what they want.
When you post new content on your website, you can post the link to your social media accounts. Giving people great content there will help build your following and bring your business new customers.
7. Find New Opportunities
Keywords are what help you create an SEO strategy. They tell you what questions people are asking on search engines and what kind of traffic you’ll see by writing articles about them. Focusing on these keywords alone makes SEO worth it.
The good news is that those aren’t the only keywords you’ll rank for. New questions come up all the time as consumer trends change. As time goes on, you’ll start ranking for keywords that you never intended to rank for in the first place.
Some of these keywords will represent new opportunities for your company. They’ll help you learn about market trends and optimize your offering for potential customers.
The Benefits of SEO Make It Worth the Effort
You might get instant results from paid traffic, but you’ll always need to put up cash if you want to keep getting traffic. If you want a reliable traffic source without paying for it, the benefits of SEO make it worth investing in. It takes time to gain rankings, so start today to start getting noticed by Google.
Do you want to learn what else you can do to drive more traffic to your site? Read our latest articles to discover our best digital marketing tips.