The Importance of SEO: A Simple (Yet Complete Guide)

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an integral part of the digital marketing world. If your blog or business doesn’t take SEO seriously, you’re missing out on an important opportunity to grow. Because most businesses now have an online presence, the use of SEO plays a significant role in determining whether your business is seen by your target audience or not.

According to statistics, ecommerce throughout the world will amount to around $4.5 trillion by the year 2021. Ecommerce will also double the amount of retail sales it accounted for as compared to the year 2015. This means that having a strong, influential online presence has now become an imperative factor in garnering more sales.

Over 81% of buyers now prefer to do online research about a product before making a purchase. This applies to purchases made from both international and local businesses. With the kind of power that online marketing now has, all you need is the right SEO strategies to get your business noticed and attract more visitors.

With Google being the biggest search engine there is, you have to make sure that your business lives up to the standards that Google has set. While Yahoo and Bing can help you get visitors to your website, it is only through Google that you can truly make your business flourish online. That’s why you need to be on top of any SEO changes and improvisations based on the ever-changing algorithms to get your website ranking higher. At seoresellerscanada.ca, we shortlist all the best SEO strategies for your brand, so you can get the most out of having an online presence.

Here are some reasons for the importance of SEO, so you can take these aspects into consideration when upgrading your website.

Contents

Increases Visibility and Traffic

The primary reason that SEO has become a vital part of your business’s online presence is because it increases visibility. This is because it makes it easier for your target audience to search for exactly what they’re looking for and come across your website.

When you create content that focuses on what your audience is looking for, you’re more likely to be noticed. SEO also helps optimize your content to show up for the kind of searches that people now make. For example, while people previously only searched for answers using 1-3 words, the searches that people make now are longer. Because of the voice-to-search option and the accessibility of cellphones, the queries are more like phrases than a couple of words.

As SEO techniques evolve, the main ways of getting your website seen is enhancing your content. It needs to be relevant and in-line with current trends. Just having a large number of backlinks won’t work to the same effect that it used to. People now search using very specific search queries, which is why SEO now includes location-centric and audience-centric content, so your business is visible to the appropriate audience.

There was a time when short-tailed keywords were the only form of SEO. Keywords still play a role, but the way they are selected and used is much more descriptive now. The right keywords for your site now need to be researched and analyzed for their effectiveness.

In order to generate traffic, and that too, the right traffic that will lead to results, is by having exceptional keywords. You’ll have to make sure that the keywords you’re using are modified to be the kind of words that people use in text-to-speech. Now that most search engines allow voice-activated searches, your keywords also need to be in long-form.

Tools like Ubersuggest make it easier for you to generate keyword ideas. You can find out what keywords and phrases are trending, and what your competitors are doing to get more clicks.

Google, along with other search engines, focuses on bringing only those websites to the forefront that have genuinely helpful and informative content, and aren’t trying too hard to make it to the first page. The key isn’t about implementing every SEO strategy that there is—the key is to use all these strategies smartly.

If you’re repeatedly using the same keyword, your website will be flagged down for “keyword overstuffing” and all your efforts will go to waste. It’s a better idea to use a combination of different keywords so that people who are searching for multiple queries regarding the same topic can still end up coming across your site.

Although SEO requirements have grown significantly, having backlinks is important. Around 91% of websites don’t get organic traffic, with 55.2% of them not having any backlinks. Having backlinks increases your probability of ranking higher in search results as well.

Remember, the best kind of traffic is that which is generated organically. Organic traffic is more prone to have actual conversions and a positive user experience because people are knowingly coming across your page and know what they are looking for.

Search engine results pages now have more organic results than they used to—because using paid advertisements is fast becoming a less opted for technique. People aren’t as likely to click on an ad either, because they’re much more careful about which sites they can safely spend money on.

Search results now also have more results for very specific things that people are looking up. If you don’t have content that answers something specific, you aren’t going to show up organically in the search engine results pages either.

Pay per click is 20 times less likely to generate traffic than using SEO techniques to get people to look into your website.

Improves Content

People will come across tens of different sources of information everyday. The only way that you can ensure that your website becomes a valuable resource for them, is by having backed up, accurate content that shows you know what you’re talking about.

55% of viewers will opt for products from websites that have informative, to-the-point, original content with exceptional graphics as well. 72% of people end up going to visit a local business that is situated nearby, if it shows up in their search results. If someone types in a query like “best gardening tools in downtown Toronto”, and you have optimized your content to include your location, your website will be among the top search results to show up.

Searches like “where to buy ______ near me” have rapidly increased by more than 200% in the past couple of years, meaning that targeted content is now more influential than ever in getting your website seen.

Another way to get people interested in your business is to generate content that appeals to their emotions. Because content is shared across multiple social media platforms, one way to get the upper hand is to differentiate how people feel about your content and other business’ content.

High quality images and graphics are what 62% of younger searchers are looking for when they are searching up a new product. Having images that are correctly tagged will make it easier for them to come across your site even through the image results.

Meta titles, descriptions, alt tags and headers can’t just be made up off the top of your head. They require careful research to ensure that people know exactly what your website is about, even if they only browse through it for a few seconds. This also increases the chances of visitors remaining on your site, because they will have clicked on it after getting an idea of the content through the meta description.

Search engine results pages now have another feature: they answer some queries directly on the results page. This plays a huge role in getting people to click through to your website—if you’re the page from where the results page has fetched the answer. You can only be featured here if you have specific metas that answer what people are looking for.

If you have several old pages on your website, a smart move would be to upgrade all of them and publish them again with newer stats and graphics. If you keep your content fresh, you can boost the amount of organic traffic you get to your website by almost 106%. It’s important to keep auditing your site and making sure none of the content has gotten irrelevant or redundant.

You can conduct audits through various tools that will tell you where each of the keywords you used rank on a search result page. You can then enter in new and improved keyword options and see whether they would rank better than the words you were using before.

Some of the most popular forms of blog posts these days are the “best ____ right now” posts. People regularly search up the top X of a certain item, vacation spots or self-help books. If you have published posts like these in the past, you should make sure they’re refurbished to include newer items. If you haven’t, it is an effective way to mention your product and give reviews about it and competitor products.

If you’re still confused about what kind of new content to come up with, using Quora or Reddit to find out what people are currently interested in and talking about is a great place to start. You’ll get tons of content, as well as keyword ideas. What’s more, you’ll get an idea of what age group, as well as what social groups of people are more interested in certain kinds of content. You’ll know what group of people to write about for your particular product and business, and which social media and online forums they visit the most as well.

Builds Authority

With so many online businesses out there, it has become increasingly important to have a website with authority. People have tens of options to search through, and one of the easiest ways to filter out and shortlist businesses is to look at their authority.

A website that seems dubious will have a much higher bounce rate than one that encourages viewers to stay on and check out the rest of the pages. One way to increase your website’s ranking is to have other businesses, influencers and articles refer to your website.

The reason why SEO is so essential is that it determines how high your website ranks. If search engines do not determine that your website is credible enough because of a lack of SEO, your site will rank lower. Lower ranking websites are rarely ever clicked on and are considered non-credible. Any website that doesn’t make it to the first page results of a search engine needs to enhance its authority in order to generate traffic.

Another way to build your website’s authority is to get more links from sites that are already high-ranking. Authoritative sources like popular businesses relevant to yours, influential people and YouTube reviewers are going to make your business seem much more trustworthy and reliable. They’ll also increase your visitors through the links they provide in their content.

Did you know that getting authority sites to link to your content can increase not just your visitors, but the number of people purchasing your products and referring to your website by up to 32%? This signals that you need to work on who you connect with and make sure that they notice your work.

You can do this by quoting relevant personnel from your field and linking back to their site in your content. You can contact them and let them know that you’re interested in learning more about what they do, and maybe even ask them if they would like to be featured in one of your blogs.

Authority can also be built up through linking to social media platforms and talking to your visitors. If you’re linking your site to your social media account, like Instagram, to showcase your products, consider engaging with your audience or posting about customers who have had a positive experience with your brand. This helps make your website look authentic, because visitors will know that there is someone they can reach out to in order to get more details.

Enhances Audience Experience

Nobody likes visiting a page that lags or takes too much time to load. Most of your potential audience will wait for a maximum of 2-3 seconds for the website to load before moving on to another, more efficient one.

SEO helps you make your site more engaging and responsive to the audience. This, in turn, increases your likeliness to get conversions from views to actual sales. You’ll also make your website mobile phone and PC friendly, so you can cater to the visiting experience of users of both devices.

57% of all searches are made on mobile phones and tablets. This means that providing users with a mobile and tablet friendly website, complete with engaging buttons, guest blogs, graphics and statistics is going to play a major role in their user experience.

You should make your content shareable, relatable and informative because people sharing content with each other is a great way to generate more traffic as well. With the use of mobile phones slowly taking over any other modes of carrying out searches, whether or not your site is mobile friendly is going to have a significant impact on your SEO. They should also be more responsive, with functional buttons that work efficiently.

One interesting way that Google encourages giving your readers a great visiting experience is the BERT algorithm. This ensures that you’re writing content that is made to educate and inform your readers about a particular topic. You have to write in such a way that it adds value to your audience’s lives, and in doing so your website will rank higher.

With reviews, images and videos, you can make sure that your website provides all the insight that a reader needs so that they don’t have to go to another site for additional resources. If people are leaving your website to go onto another one, it counts as a negative factor for Google’s rankings. This usually happens when someone clicks on your website and immediately returns to the results page again. One reason for this happening is that the website doesn’t load fast enough to retain the visitors attention, and they quickly lose patience.

In case something like this is happening to your site, for example, if you’ve been getting unusually high traffic, or your website is going through renovations, you can add an error page that makes your visitors feel better about having their time go to waste. One way to do this is to have a link that takes them to a discounted offer for one of your products, or a game that keeps them entertained until the website loads.

Not having an engaging website isn’t only decreasing the number of visitors to your page and lowering your ranking. If you rely on ads for revenue, you need to show them that you have a substantial amount of visibility on all the pages of your website that you hope to have ads on.

If you’re a blogger or an influencer whose viewers don’t spend enough time scrolling through your site’s pages, then you have a high bounce rate. People looking to publish ads on websites are not going to spend their money on a website where a large amount of people aren’t going to see their ad. The more of your site’s pages that visitors go through, the more money an investor is going to be willing to pay.

In extreme cases, sites that show that their visitors have a largely negative user experience can even become blacklisted or banned. This is how search engines ensure that only those websites remain at the top that are actually helping people—based on the behaviour of other visitors.

If you want to be even more cautious about how your audience perceives your website, consider making it accessible for those that are differently-abled as well. Having features like reading from the screen, larger text, voice-activated controls and easy, well explained navigation, you’ll unlock a much larger audience base than you had access to before,

Helps Your Business Grow

If you’re wondering why your business needs SEO—the answer is simple. It’s no longer possible to run an online business without taking extra steps to have your website be seen. Many people opt for an expert to help them with appropriate SEO strategies, like seoresellerscanada.ca. We analyze your entire website so you’re out with the old and in with all the new techniques there are.

Losing out on your website’s profitability through inefficient SEO strategies is a huge waste of potential. This is because SEO is fairly easy—once you know what you have to change, add or remove. Although there is no way that you can stop your potential audience from visiting other websites or reviewing another business’s products, you can make their experience with your business be memorable enough for them to prefer you over the rest.

SEO is a great technique when it comes to growing your business. By controlling your ranking and managing the number of visitors that come to your page every day, you have complete control over the steps you take in order to correct any shortcomings.

For any business that is seriously looking to work on its SEO, you need to install the relevant apps and programs that will guide you towards better SEO tactics. Google My Business is an extremely helpful tool. It helps you manage what your business looks like online, what you can do to optimize your site and how many visitors you’re getting with your site’s current situation.

You’ll also be able to engage with your customers, share pictures with them and respond to negative and positive Google reviews as well. You’ll get control over what people see when they search for your brand, and also help people find where your business is located. Brands that use photos have a 42% more chance of getting requests for directions on Google maps as well. Using photos on your profile also increases your chances of visitors clicking through to your website by 35%.

So, what can SEO do for your business? The number of people who are interested in your brand changes drastically when you have engaging marketing strategies, know what kind of content to use in order to launch a product, and make sure that you give your potential customer base exactly the kind of information that they’re looking for.

Other great tools that help you better understand what you need for SEO are Moz, SearchEngineJournal and Ubersuggest.

.

Managing your online reputation is imperative in keeping up a steady flow of visitors. These tools will help you compare yourself to your competitors and make any necessary improvements in order to be at par with them. You’ll also be able to see which sites are linking to your site and whether they’re promoting your brand or talking about it in a negative light.

These tools will tell you about what’s trending, who the most influential people are in the field that you’re looking for and which influencers are mentioning you in their social media posts.

Optimizes Your Website

SEO comes in two types: on-page and off-page. The on-page SEO includes everything that you can do to have a better online presence. These are all the techniques to up your website game and become a more credible site for people to spend time on. Nobody likes a website that isn’t user friendly, has broken links or hasn’t been updated in months.

The off-page SEO aspect of your website includes what other sites do that generates more visibility and traffic for you. This usually means the links that they use to refer to your site or promote a certain product from your business. Having a strong off-page presence significantly helps to build your website’s credibility.

The kind of content you have on your website will either make or break your online-generated sales. There are a number of uses for content for the purpose of promoting your business, but one of them is to regularly publish content that will build up an audience base that will be interested in your products.

An example of this is if you publish articles related to gardening, such as gardening tips, essential tools and the best kind of plants to keep according to the weather. So, why use SEO marketing? Because through the right keywords and precise, helpful content, you’ll gather enough prospective customers for when you finally launch a new gardening tool.

The four most important factors that search engines consider when ranking websites are: number of website visits by people, the amount of time they spend on the site, how many pages they go through each time they pay a visit, and what the bounce rate is.

If you can work on these four factors, you have a much better website than most businesses already.

If your website has more than one author, SEO can help standardize your content to be search engine optimized regardless of who is writing it. It will help you come up with a checklist that makes sure you’re all working according to the same set of SEO requirements before your content is published.

SEO tools will help you figure out what parts of your website visitors are staying on the longest, so that you can use the same criteria on your other pages as well. The landing page of your website is what initially draws a new visitor in, so you can optimize that to explain what your brand is about, where you’re located and anything that will make visitors want to explore the rest of your website as well.

Final Words

If you weren’t sure why your business needs SEO, hopefully, the points here have made it clearer why SEO is now a vital part of any website. Your website is not unique when it comes to the kind of products or information you are providing, because there are millions of pages on the world wide web.

What actually differentiates you from other websites is HOW you present the content that you have. It’s about the kind of experience you give your readers. It’s about how much you’re investing into getting high-quality images, stats, reviews, guest blogs and referrals. This reassures your potential clients that they’re on a reliable site.

Remember, more than 65% of people are going to go for the top 5 results that they see on the first page of search engine results. Among these top 5, you have to get them to be more interested in what your business has to offer as compared to others.

That’s why SEO isn’t only about appearing in those top results. It’s also about being the best website that provides the most engaging user experience and content for visitors. You can’t just use every SEO technique that you come across without making sure that it works specifically for your business. Good SEO practices will not only get your business seen but will keep your website among the most clicked on and visited sites there are, if you keep yourself updated and changing with any newly introduced algorithm.

For now, the topmost reasons that SEO is so important for your business are that:

1. It improves your website’s visibility and increases the flow of traffic
2. It helps you generate more engaging content
3. It builds your website’s authority
4. It helps your business flourish online and offline
5. It gives you ideas on how to optimize your website

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jamie Barton

CEO of NASN Licensing Inc. & Shopincities.com

Jamie has more than two decades of experience in accelerating brand visibility for online businesses. His company operates SEOResellersCanada.ca, a white label SEO and digital marketing agency. With his unique and actionable business processes, agencies and small businesses can successfully expand online operations without the traditional associated cost overhead.