Why Is SEO Important For Businesses?
Why SEO is important for business is hard to understand, considering its cost and complexity. Related and equally important questions include:
- Can your company live without SEO?
- What kind of results can you expect from SEO?
- Why is everybody so interested in SEO?
Let’s take a look.
Lead Generation and E-Commerce Revenue
First and foremost, Google’s search engine is the most popular marketplace on the planet. A look at Google search statistics boggles the mind:
- More than 40,000 searches per second
- More than 3.5 billion searches per day
- More than 1.2 trillion searches per year
- More than 65 percent market share of global search volume
- More than 88 percent market share of U.S. search volume
When people are looking for the products and services you sell, Google search is probably the first place they go. If people want what you sell but don’t know who you are or don’t know you have that particular thing, then it’s hard to build a solid lead pipeline or stream of e-commerce revenue without a presence on Google.
Driving leads and e-commerce revenue mainly explains why SEO is so important for business. While companies with a lead generation website can ill afford to ignore Google, e-commerce websites have virtually no choice in the matter. If you are selling products or services online in the U.S. and are not tapping into Google’s near 90 percent market share, you simply cannot compete.
Credibility, Reach and Conversions
Extremely important fringe benefits of SEO are adding credibility and expanding the marketing reach to your company. Retail and commercial sales prospects almost always check out organizations on Google before starting to do business. If your company is invisible on Google, what conclusions are these prospects likely to draw? On the other hand, if your business ranks highly in Google’s organic results, prospects are likely to infer that your organization is reputable and reliable.
SEO campaigns not only help improve organic ranking, they go beyond rankings to:
- Make your on-site content higher in quality
- Create off-site content that exposes your company to new, large and relevant audiences
- Cultivate positive online reviews of your business that may appear both on your website and on popular user review sites
- Through keyword research, discover promising new market segments
- Through local SEO, penetrate new geographic markets, test market new products and services, and/or fend off strong local competitors
Continuous Improvement
All of these outgrowths of an SEO campaign widen the scope of your prospecting pool and improve the likelihood that prospects will convert. And, while all of these things are going on, your SEO campaign, through ongoing testing, is becoming more effective, making these fringe benefits all the more substantial.
The continuous improvement character of SEO campaigns that should not be overlooked. The worst day of an SEO campaign should be the first day. It is true that sometimes SEO campaigns level off or even dip downward, campaigns can also be broadened in scope by targeting additional keywords, implementing strategic local campaigns or by engaging in other, specialized techniques.
SEO As a Corporate Asset
A final area of value for SEO is widely overlooked: SEO as a corporate asset. If your business has very high rankings on Google, think about how valuable that would be to a strategic buyer of your company. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach top rankings in certain businesses — if a buyer can achieve that immediately thanks to your efforts, it could make a significant difference in the sale price.
Investing in SEO for the purpose of creating a valuable corporate asset rarely occurs, but it is another fringe benefit well worth considering when you are faced with allocating resources among multiple marketing options.
Is SEO Important for Every Business?
We’ve addressed why SEO is important for business, but the question remains: Is SEO important for every business?
There are some situations where SEO may not make a lot of sense. Maybe your business is so specialized, there simply isn’t enough search volume around what you do to justify an SEO campaign. Maybe your geographic market is too small to justify SEO. Maybe your competitors are so large and so dominant that you could never make a dent in organic rankings.
Even in these situations, it could be feasible to construct an SEO campaign that generates significant ROI. We invite you to check in with us to discuss the possibilities.
Please contact us now or call 855-883-0011.