In the current business world, there are many advantages of search engine optimization, or SEO, and it is extremely important in establishing a successful business and in getting your business noticed by your potential audience. If your business has no online presence, it limits the number of people that have access to your services or products.
If you do not have online reviews, customers will not be able to get an idea of the overall perception of your brand. If you do not have a social media platform where potential customers can interact with you, ask questions and view images of the products you offer, people will not be able to decide whether they want to proceed with your business or not.
Businesses that operate solely through online networks require SEO even more urgently than those that have a physical store or outlet. This is because there are hundreds and thousands of online business, out of which several of them are likely to be marketing the same products or services as you. The only way to be noticed among these websites is to have the proper SEO tools and strategies that get your business to show up on the first page of search engine results.
Unless your business’s website shows up on the first page, you’re not going to get any traffic. The amount of people that go past the first page of search engine results is hardly 25% of the total 3.5+ billion searches that are carried out on Google alone. By not having updated SEO practices, your business is missing out on a significant number of potential customers.
89% of businesses say that SEO has worked in their favour and has boosted the number of people visiting their website and investing in their business as well. If your brand still has not considered SEO to expand and explore your business’s potential, you’re missing out.
At SEO Resellers Canada, we can help you find the best SEO techniques that will work for your business. We’ll help you optimize your website and online presence to be relevant and cater to the needs of the potential audience you are targeting.
We will be discussing the following 20 benefits of search engine optimization for business:
1- SEO Directs Traffic to Your Website
One of the primary reasons why every business invests in SEO is to direct traffic to their website. As mentioned above, over 75% of people admit that they never go past the first page when browsing search engine results.
This means that directing traffic towards your website is a race to be featured in the top results. This cannot happen unless you have the proper keywords and relevant content that ensures your website shows up in as many search results as possible.
Generating traffic does not have to mean placing numerous ads in as many places as you can find. It is more about having optimized content that reflects what most people are searching for when they enter a phrase or question into the search bar.
The reason why more people are going to click on your website when you have used SEO techniques is that they were already interested in products or services similar to your brand. That’s why SEO is so powerful—it only targets the audience that is most likely to be interested in the products or services you have to offer. All you have to do next is to encourage them to make a purchase.
2- There Are More Chances of Traffic Converting to Sales
Following the previous point, the traffic that you generate through SEO also leads to more sales. This is because the traffic that comes to your website is organic. The people who click through to the purchasing stage of your business were already interested in products or services related to what your brand has to offer—all they needed was the opportunity to come across your website.
The conversion rate through SEO tools is higher because not only are you getting more people to invest in your business, you’re also building a larger audience for the future. By pushing out quality content that encourages people to become regular visitors of your website, you’re ensuring that these people will be the first to make an investment when your brand comes out with a new product or service.
You’ll also have a clearer idea of the market, based on what kind of content your readers interact with the most. The higher the conversions from clicks to sales, the more money your business will make. Without smart SEO practices, you could be missing out on thousands of dollars in additional sales.
3- Investing in SEO Is Cost Effective
Using SEO techniques will not cost you a significant amount of money. Many brands even use free SEO tools to get started with their website, and still make a profit off of them. The only main investment in SEO is to have an experienced SEO company that knows how to optimize your website to generate the most leads, the rest of the work happens by itself.
The reason why SEO is inexpensive is that it doesn’t require that you place paid advertisements on search engines or on social media platforms. The type of marketing that SEO focuses on is already aimed at your potential audience, so the return on investment you get from investing in SEO strategies is higher than the older methods of marketing that businesses used to use, like paid ads that were visible by everyone at large, regardless of whether or not they would be interested in a particular product or service.
4- It Helps Optimize Your Website
One major benefit of SEO is that it helps you have a faster, more engaging and attractive website that keeps visitors on your page for longer. A drawback to having a high bounce rate (the number of people leaving your website as soon as they enter) is that it decreases your ratings for search engines and pushes you lower in the search results. You can correct this by having a website that addresses people’s queries and ensures they have access to the information they were looking for when they clicked on your website.
Having a user-friendly website is essential in increasing your sales. Your potential customers are not going to waste their time on a website that is slow to load, doesn’t work on cellphones or has outdated content from months ago. There are hundreds of websites offering similar information, so you need to be among the best in order to assure customers that you are worth their time.
Having relevant and informational content also increases your rankings with search engines, because they reward websites and pages that address frequently asked questions and engage constructively with their readers.
5- Enhances Your Visibility
When your potential audience comes across your website in several search results, it increases your brand’s visibility. A person needs to see your brand pop up around 5-7 times through various searches in order to remember and associate your brand with a specific niche, product or service.
Since SEO focuses on using the right keywords to get your brand to show up in as many search results as possible, your future customers are more likely to click on your website once they have gained the confidence that you specialize in a particular area.
6- Helps Create Brand Awareness Among Your Audience
With improved visibility comes increased brand awareness. The more often your website shows up in search results, the more people are going to associate your brand with the products or services they are looking for. The stronger your web presence, the more chances you have that people will make the move towards clicking on your website, because they have enough evidence of what your website is about.
This kind of web presence and brand awareness can only be constructed through using the right keywords and phrases when creating your content. The more variety you put into the keywords you use in your website’s content, the more opportunities you create for your website to show up in numerous different results.
Another way of creating awareness is by including your location in your keywords. This makes it easier for the audience in your area to find you and possibly visit your store to make a purchase. They’ll remember that your website catered to people living near a certain area, which makes you more reliable and accessible.
7- Builds Reliability
98% of people will go on to choose a website that showed up somewhere on the first page of search engine results when making an investment. Not only is this because people rarely make the effort of going to the second page, but because the websites that show up on the first page are perceived as being more trustworthy and credible.
When you pair this with a website that provides substantial information and is regularly maintained, you increase your chances of conversion, simply by making some SEO related improvements to your brand.
8- Keeps You Ahead of Your Competition
One reason why your business needs SEO is that using smart SEO techniques to improve your business’s web presence will get you 20 times more traffic than using older techniques like pay per click. Paid advertisements used to be effective once upon a time, and they still are to an extent.
However, if your competitor relies solely on advertisements to generate traffic, you are well ahead of them in your chances of getting more customers. Not only does it give you a visibility boost when it goes into full swing, but you continue to get more traffic than your competitors as long as you regularly keep a check on the changing SEO strategies.
9- Continues to Pay off in the Future
Over 60 000 searches are done per second, only on Google. Even when you’re not actively trying to promote a product or service, having put the right SEO strategies into place means that these techniques will continue to benefit you well into the future.
Every brand is looking for ways to ensure their business’s success in the long run. Professional SEO tools are built to keep your brand prospering and bringing in customers. The return on investment that you get through investing invaluable SEO strategies is much higher than if you leave your website to generate traffic on its own.
SEO tools also keep checking for updates and changes in search engine algorithms to figure out ways to keep your website at the top of its game. You’ll constantly be learning new ways to generate leads and create content that resonates with what is currently trending, so your website is always relevant and in the top results of the first page.
10- Upgrades Your Digital Marketing Methods
Like every business now knows, digital marketing is no longer only about sending emails or having ads that pop up when people are visiting another website. It’s also no longer about simply marketing the product or service that you have to offer.
Digital marketing has to expand into different areas, like social media marketing, using videos, tutorials, and high-quality content. Partnering with social media influencers and bloggers is another useful strategy. Your potential audience no longer relies solely on ads to decide whether or not they want to invest in your brand.
They’ll go through your social media profile, your content and the kinds of people that are posting reviews about your brand before even considering a purchase. This means that an expansive digital marketing campaign using SEO strategies is the most effective way of bringing in organic traffic that is likely to convert to sales.
11- Is More Inclusive of Your Marketing Funnel
There are different stages of marketing. Your potential customers go through a series of steps before they make the eventual decision of buying from your brand. With the right use of SEO, you can target every part of your buying funnel in order to ensure that you do not lose customers at any stage.
For example, if people are drawn to your brand because of the high-quality, informative content that you post on a regular basis, you have already created a large, organic audience. 60% of buyers opt for brands that have helpful content that they can benefit from.
However, if you do not have proper strategies to convert these readers into buyers, your effort will be in vain. With the right SEO tools, you can find ways to create content and a website interface that eventually leads the readers into the buying stage and invest in your business.
12- You Get a Better Idea of Your Performance
Using the relevant SEO tools, you can analyse how well your website is performing in terms of your ranking in search engines, how many clicks you are getting, how long people stay on your website and whether or not the clicks are leading to purchases.
You will also get an idea of how well your website is doing in comparison to your competitors by assessing the keywords they are using to see which ones generate the most clicks. Because SEO tools regularly examine your website to give you an idea of how much business your website is generating, they will give your monthly updates about your performance. This makes it very easy to compare your performance in different months and see whether a certain marketing or keyword strategy was working better than another.
This also helps you with your return on investment. When you know how much time and money you have invested into coming up with the SEO strategies that you currently have, and how much it cost you to partner with a blogger or pay a freelancer for your website’s content, you’ll know whether the revenue you are generating is compensating for the price you have paid.
Different tools like Google Analytics or Moz.com can help you analyze your website, as well as that of your competitor’s, to determine whether you are on track or if you need to be making tweaks to your strategies.
13- Gives You Better ROI
Return on investment, or ROI, is essential in gauging whether your business is performing well. You need to know whether your strategies are working in your business’s favour or not, right from the start. Many businesses does not keep track of how much money they are spending on marketing and SEO strategies in the initial phases of their business, because they believe that it is okay to keep spending as much as needed until they establish their business.
While this is partly true, you have to be careful about spending too much on marketing and not generating enough revenue in return. Having a low ROI is an indication for you to start making changes to your strategies instead of applying the same ones more rigorously.
When you generate more leads, you’ll get more ROI. With only traditional ways of marketing, you are only making a minimal amount of ROI that does not add up to enough revenue, even if you look at the entire year’s worth of revenue. However, with the right SEO and digital marketing methods, you can make an average of $28 000 a year on leads, but that is only when you keep your website on the first page of search engine results.
14- You Learn More About Your Customers
When you know more about the kinds of people that are interested in your products or services, you learn better ways of marketing to and appealing to them. SEO tools give you an idea of what pages of your website people are staying on for a longer duration, and at what stage they decide to proceed and make an investment.
You also learn about where your customers are from, their age range and other areas of interest. This helps you develop more customized marketing strategies in the future, so that you can continue to cater to these customers’ interests in the future.
You’ll even learn about the exact problems that your customers were searching up when they came across your website. This will help you create content that addresses those problems, so your customers can start seeing you as a credible source of information about an issue that they are curious about.
15- You Develop a Better Social Media Presence
Social media is more important now than it has ever been before. This is because people have become very vocal and elaborate about the issues they faced with a business, or whether they had a positive experience. New potential customers rely heavily on the kind of reviews they see before making any final decisions, so you have to be careful about the image you have portrayed on your social media.
Tools like Google My Business are helpful in managing your online reviews and helping people find your store. It’s also effective in displaying images of your store and your products so that people can feel safer about deciding to pay your store a visit.
So, how can SEO benefit your business through social media? You’ll get an idea of what social media platform your customers use the most, and you will be able to engage with them in a way that assures them that you are invested in their concerns. If most of your audience responds positively through emails, you may have an older group of customers. If most of your audience find you through your Instagram page, then you will know to make exceptional quality posts there so that they can learn more about your upcoming products and services.
16- It Goes Above and Beyond What a Salesperson Could Do
Of course, it isn’t easy to outdo the human ability to convince people to invest in a brand. However, many people these days prefer to have all the information they need laid out in front of them so that they can make the decision of buying on their own.
In fact, now, people get annoyed and may even refrain from choosing your brand if they were to receive a call from a telemarketer or a door-to-door salesperson. Most people prefer being able to weigh the pros and cons of your brand on their own, through their own carefully carried out research.
Customers like to compare your brand to others before deciding where they want to invest their money is. That’s why you need to use the right SEO tools to make your website informative and interactive, so that your potential customers make the decision to stick to your brand. A salesperson would not be able to naturally talk about the cons of another brand without coming off as forceful, while a website that subtly hints at the advantages of your brand and the disadvantages of possible other brands only comes off as informational.
Another reason why websites are more effective is because your potential customers can place an order whenever they feel like it or visit your site to read up on your brand at any time of the day or night. They do not have to worry about getting in touch with a real sales representative unless they have specific questions that have not been answered on your website or are specific to an issue that they are having.
17- Promotes Your Brand and Encourages Referrals
People are using their cellphones or laptops all the time. When someone comes across helpful information that you have mentioned on your website, or if they discover that your products or services would come in handy for someone that they know, they can refer your website to them. Having a strong online presence and shareable content makes it far easier to get visibility through your current customers.
This can also be done through having bloggers and influencers refer to your business in their posts. If the content seems interesting, people are likely to click through to your website and you’ll have greater chances of leading to conversions.
18- Adds Substance to Your Ads
Even though websites that appear on search engines organically acquire more than 90% of clicks and leave only 10% for paid ads, your business can still invest in ads as an added measure. The benefits of SEO services include helping you improve your website’s landing pages so that your ads become more informative.
For example, if you have paid for an ad to appear on a website or search engine, it will only be effective if your potential customers land on a page where they learn more about the product they were interested in and are provided with the right instructions on how to proceed and make the purchase as well.
Previously, ads consisted only of one-liners and little to no substantial information about the product or service. With the help of SEO, you can give your customers the chance to make an informed decision before investing in your brand.
19- Gives You Content Ideas
Using tools like Ubersuggest will help you determine what kind of keywords are trending and what people are more willing to read. You should always come up with content that leads to the promotion of an upcoming or current product or service because website content acts as a marketing campaign.
For example, if you are about to launch a new line of safe cookware, you can start with creating and uploading regular content about different kinds of cookware, their safety levels and the pros and cons of investing in them. When you have developed a substantial number of followers for a particular product, you can introduce them to your product that you will know that they are genuinely interested in.
20- Helps Your On-Site Store Business as Well
If you have a business set up at a location, you can use your online presence to promote your physical outlet as well. When you use keywords like “gardening tools Downtown Toronto,” people who search for this phrase are very likely to come across your website and make a visit to your outlet.
As long as you have proper phones numbers and addresses for your stores, as well as a map that helps people locate where you are, you are good to go. Hence, if you were wondering what is SEO and its benefits to your local outlet, the answer is that it gives people a chance to discover your website which then leads them to your store to make a purchase.
Final Thoughts
So, how can SEO benefit your business? The ways are many, but the only way that you can truly take advantage of them is if you work with a professional SEO company that helps you improve your website and your online presence and help you determine where you are lacking in terms of social media and digital marketing.
You will learn about content creation and interacting with your customers in ways that improve your website’s ratings and bring you to the first page of search engines, but none of this is possible unless you are careful and stay up to date on the changing algorithms and trends. Here at SEO Resellers Canada, we help you learn ways to optimize your website and generate more traffic and conversions.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 31, 2020, and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
