Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been, hands down, the most powerful tool to get organic exposure and more organic traffic within search engines. Using high-end perfect SEO tactics, websites can enhance their visibility online while growing sales exponentially.
Nowadays search engine optimization is considered to be a key component in deciding a website’s performance, also known as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). People nowadays invest more time and money into proper SEO tactics to get more organic traffic within the website.
Now, what does SEO mean and is it worth the time and effort?
SEO: What Is It?
Guess how many websites there are right now. Any ideas?
According to hostingfacts.com, there are over 1.94 billion websites on the internet. This means that search engines may have a very tough time going through so many websites at once.
To solve this problem, the search engines have come up with web crawlers. These are robots which crawl through each website to know exactly what the website is about.
To do this, the robots look up into the repeated keywords, title tags, headings, images, backlinks and usability of websites to rank them in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is a way to let these web crawlers to know what our website is about. This helps them to clearly identify our website, and rank the website higher into the SERP.
So, How Does SEO Help?
Well, the first five links in the first page of a typical SERP tend to get more than 67% of all clicks. This means that ranking higher in the SERP can be crucial in order to attain organic traffic.
To do this, SEO can play a big role. SEO clearly identifies the parameter for the algorithm and helps the search engine to properly understand the website and the keywords. It lets the search engines to know exactly when to suggest the website to a user looking for a specific search result over the internet.
Other than that, the link building of the website and the number of backlinks help the robots to clearly identify the credibility of the source, making the website stand out in the SERP.
This means that websites having clearly defined keywords as demanded by users and quality backlinks will be featured in the SERPs. The better search engine optimization is done for the website, the higher the chances of exposure and the higher traffic the website will receive.
But, little do we know the true power of SEO.
Why, you may ask?
This is very simple – SEO is one of the underrated tools for any business. For most businesses, SEO is all about link building and keywords.
But, is it?
Nope! There are many other important aspects of SEO that can help websites rank higher with better efficiency.
What’s The True Power Of SEO?
Search engine optimization is itself a very complicated and time-consuming process. Reaping the benefits of SEO can take time, but it is surely worth the effort we put it.
Although the drive to reach to the top of SERPs can motivate businesses to perform SEO best practices for the website, the true power of SEO is not limited to only the search engine results pages. In fact, SEO can help a business grow and thrive in a world of competition!
By harnessing the true power of SEO, we can ensure that we’re getting enough exposure and driving organic traffic to our websites which in turn helps get more exposure. But, what are the powers of SEO that we’re talking about? Let’s find out:
Helps To Stay Relevant
Whenever we perform SEO tactics, we ensure that we know what the business is about and what services we want to offer to the customers. With this in mind, the SEO experts craft a long list of keywords which relates to the searching patterns of the potential customers.
Performing SEO on a regular basis ensures that you know exactly where you need to go while knowing the core values and areas of focus.
Gives Quality Traffic
Ensuring that your website comes up at the top of the SERP will help you gain quality traffic. This is because people who search for the relevant keyword gets to see your website, and it is more likely that they are interested in the product or service.
SEO, unlike any other marketing campaigns, doesn’t annoy the end users and helps to reach out to a massive audience without having to waste a lot of money.
Staying Well Ahead Of Competitors
Globalization has put up an impact on everyone – especially for small to medium businesses. Online businesses tend to face immense competition, and it is very important to attract customers.
Ensuring that you put in your best efforts in effective SEO will help you gain ranks faster in the SERPs. This will, eventually, help you to get to the top if the SEO is done right.
Long-Term Benefits
Most businesses focus on the short-term goals and the short term return-on-investment (ROI) for such SEO tactics. However, SEO can truly be powerful because it brings organic traffic to the website for a long time if the website is relevant to the users.
Search Engines like Google have hinted that they rank the websites according to the user experience. If you have relevant and updated content that the users want, they will come to your websites every so often. It will give you a further boost without any doing SEO to the website.
Helps Build A Brand
SEO works best when you have a clearly defined set of keywords, and the content of the website circulates around the keywords. Doing so ensures relevancy and helps to create a brand. Whenever your customers visit your site, they’re sure of getting insights into your business and/or other information that they might not get elsewhere.
Having highly researched content in blogs can also be very important. It helps in increasing the credibility of the website. It means that people will trust your website more, and they’ll come back for more.
It will surely help boost your traffic and also sales (consumers are more confident about you).
Enabling Geo-Targeting
Let’s be serious; SEO can really get complicated. People often search for products and/or services located close to their residence. This can be excellent for businesses as they can precisely locate and cater their services according to the locations they want to.
Let’s say that you own a bakery business in Manchester. If you want to cater your cakes to the people in Manchester, you can use relevant keywords like ‘cakes in Manchester,’ ‘best bakery in Manchester’, etc. to make sure that people living in or nearby the area sees the result. Search engines like Google also gives a slight boost to local businesses and services, so you can be confident of exposure.
While there are a few options to get exposure, SEO is clearly one of the easiest and cheapest ways for gaining exposure. It is also proven to give out lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) meaning that you need to spend less to acquire the same customer when compared to other types of marketing.
SEO also brings in a high return-on-investment!
The only downfall, however, is the time longevity and efforts that you must put in on a regular basis.
Knowing Your Customers
Search engine optimization can help to get better insights into your customers, including their ages and choice. You can get deeper and profound data directly from your keyword researches. This helps to clearly identify the people who you might want to target.
Common Misconceptions About SEO
Up until now, we’ve gone through some of the advantages of search engine optimization. Although SEO can be quite powerful for driving organic traffic, there are some misconceptions relating to SEO which may diminish the power of SEO. Let’s go some of the common misconceptions:
SEO is a one-time thing
In a world of massive competition, it is important that you stay on top of your competitors. In this case, you should always be performing SEO to rank higher in the search engine results pages.
I’ve seen people who failed to identify the importance of SEO, and they got demotivated after a couple of months trying SEO. Eventually, they stopped focusing on SEO. This led to a decrease in the organic traffic on their website.
To sum up, SEO is ‘NOT A ONE TIME THING’! It is a slow but gradual process. Performing SEO for a longer time span will help the business to flourish in the long run.
SEO is all about Content Marketing
Blogs have gained immense popularity in the recent times. For most mediocre marketers, content marketing is the go-to strategy for SEO. However, this should not be the case. Whilst it is important to implement keywords and backlinks, SEO can include multiple metrics that don’t have anything to do with the content of your website.
SEO includes content marketing as an integral part of the whole system, but it is the mixture of multiple tactics which makes SEO successful.
SEO is for search engines, not for the users
When performing SEO for a website, most people do not realize how important it is to optimize content for the users and not the search engines. Popular search engines like Google have always indicated the importance of enhancing the user experiences, and have already penalized websites that have irrelevant keywords to gain organic traffic.
Understanding the basics of whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO will help you understand how to better organize your website to match SERP’s needs.
It’s An Easy and Quick Process
I have come across many people who think that SEO is all about keywords. It’s not, actually! There are hundreds of other metrics one should look at to better enhance the power of SEO for the website.
While performing SEO, you must make sure that your content is indexed by search engines, improve upon backlinks, inbound links, research on keywords and many other aspects. These truly shows how complicated and time-consuming SEO can be.
Performing effective SEO with all the metrics and using our time identifying the key points can help a website rank higher in SERPs.
Conclusion
The world of SEO can be a vast one. It is crucial that you know the true power of SEO and implements perfect SEO tactics to ensure the best use of the process.
SEO can help to stay industry-relevant, gain much needed organic traffic, lead to more conversions, helps to build a brand and stay ahead of all the competitors. It is one of the most important techniques for most marketers, and this is the prime reason for its immense popularity.
While performing SEO, however, you must make sure that you cut through all the myths and misconceptions to get the most out of your SEO marketing efforts.
SEO can truly be a time-consuming effort, and it is important that you perform each step with utter perfection. This will help you to gain more organic traffic and get more customers.
While this might be the case, it is recommended that you outsource your SEO tasks to professional digital marketing agencies. You will be sure of your SEO efforts being one of the best, and you can easily cruise through your competitors. Other than that, Digital Marketing Agencies ensure other packages that are highly suitable for the growth of your business.