eMarketing Blog

 SEO isn’t some hocus-pocus method that magically increases traffic and places your website at the top of Google search engine results pages (SERPs) instantly. Quite the opposite, actually: SEO is challenging work and it takes time, but the benefits are outstanding.

SEO is about enhancing your online presence by making your website rank better in the SERPs for certain keywords and phrases with both on-page and off-page optimization tactics. This includes creating unique keyword-rich copy and Meta data as well as making your website “crawler” friendly. SEO also includes building links that point to your site from other sites (off-page optimization). Google loves (most) links! Optimizing your own website (on-page optimization) is not enough—these links are vital to the entire process. Think of these links as a ‘vote’ for your site; if another site trusts you enough to link to you, why wouldn’t Google trust you too?

When you have an effective SEO strategy in place, users searching for your selected keywords are much more likely to find you; your site will appear much higher up on the page results compared to if no optimization had occurred at all.

It’s About Getting Quality, Relevant Traffic.

In other words, SEO is all about driving the exact type of traffic you need to your website: your target market. It’s all about helping businesses become more visible to their customers and helping their target customers find exactly what they’re searching for. You’re meeting customers looking for your products and services exactly where they’re at; it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Think about how you search. Just like you, your customers tend to click on the first few results or at least in the first few pages of the search results; beyond the first three pages the traffic is significantly low. So, you can imagine that if your website is sitting in the top 10 or 20 search results, you’ll be getting a lot more traffic to your website—I think it goes without mentioning that’s a great thing in generating sales leads.

Why You Need It.

If your business is mostly supported by its web presence, you need SEO, especially if you’re a new business. Without SEO, your business is basically invisible to the millions of users using search engines for information, resulting in little to no leads or sales for you.

Just think how SEO works—and then think about your competitors. There’s a good chance that they too are optimizing their own site for search engines. The hard (and literal) truth is: if your competitors are optimizing and you are not, your site will be “buried alive” by the competition. In essence then, SEO is necessary to remain visible to your customer base and remain competitive.

Every web-based business owner needs to do at least some SEO work—but going above and beyond and remaining on top of SEO trends is vital to becoming a truly powerful website.