So you want to know why people are raving about SEO’s benefits and how it helped their businesses.

Chances are you have recently heard of the acronym. Maybe you were attending a digital marketing webinar, or having a zoom meeting with other entrepreneurs. Then, either a speaker or a friend unmutes their mic to say “yes! SEO did wonders to my website”.

Now you are here. Eager to learn why these words were so exaltedly pronounced. So here we go…

What is SEO?

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of increasing a website’s chances of ranking higher up on search engine results such as Google or Yahoo’s.

These can be done through a variety of practices, which include both modifying a website directly, as well as gathering support for your brand on other domains across the internet. The extent to which any of these practices affect a website’s ranking varies from industry to industry and constantly changes under the supervision of AI.

If you want to learn more about what SEO is, please visit this link.

Onto the benefits…

Drive Traffic towards your site

The first and most obvious reason as to why any business, start-up, or entrepreneur chooses to carry out an SEO strategy for their website is because of the traffic it helps generate.

Millions of people use search engines daily; whether it be to look for a new brand of pet food, or to help make multi-million dollar decisions. Making use of these powerful potential traffic channels is not only the smartest choice but is also one that guarantees an influx of users which already have a problem needing to be solved.

When a potential client is looking for a product or service, your website could be either among the first ten results or lost in the sea of digital irrelevancy.

Depending on the niche a business is set up around, it may be easier or harder to rank on the first page. Some factors affecting this are the amount of competition for a search query or term, the quality of content competitors produce, and the quantity of sub-topics which can have strategies built around them.

Cost-Effective Online Marketing

The strongest argument towards why someone should start an SEO strategy on their website is that it is quite simply the most cost-effective form of marketing out there.

A business website is essential for any growing business in the digital era we live in. Oftentimes these are desperately in need of better conversion funnels with which to generate sales from new and recurrent users.

Good SEO will often rectify issues that may affect the effectiveness of a conversion funnel. Some of the ways this can be achieved are: fixing broken links; making pages load faster; and ensuring the mobile version of the website is fully functional.

In practice, the main purpose of SEO is not to improve conversion funnels. These actions carry that additional impact because the core of SEO is to create a better experience for your users. That is what search engines favor.

Additional actions, such as link building, increases brand awareness across the web. This both positively impacts other ranking factors and generates traffic to your website through the other web page.

Faster Website Loading Times

At the heart of the many tools at the disposal of an SEO engineer, we find one that is invaluable to any e-Commerce site, blog, agency; you name it. The first thing a good SEO professional will do as they start working on your site is to make it faster. There are many ways. Using a content delivery network (CDN); compiling files together; and optimizing images are only but a few.

Whichever method used, a faster website is certainly going to positively impact your user experience, and ultimately the number of leads it generates.

When a website does not load fast enough, many potential customers will simply leave. A potential sale lost. This is especially true for mobile users.

“Research by Google has found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds.” – David Kirkpatrick from MarketingDive

Reducing the loading time of a website drastically improves user experience. Users spend less time annoyed and more time scrolling through products or filling out a contact form.

Direct Increase in Revenue

When a website gets both more traffic and its users spend more time browsing, its revenue will certainly go up. Let’s take the following formula for calculating revenue on an eCommerce website.

The number of users will depend on all of a site’s traffic channels. However, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, an increase in web traffic is a direct benefit of SEO.

Organic traffic from search engines constitutes up to 50% of all traffic in some of the most successful eCommerce platforms. For businesses that don’t have any traffic incoming from search engines, SEO represents the potential to sometimes even quadruple monthly users.

Following the formula for revenue, four times the users would result in an increase in up to four times the revenue. However, since new users obtained from engine searches usually have a higher buyer intent than users captured through other marketing techniques, the conversion rate is certainly going to increase. This drives even more revenue to the business.

Last words on SEO

If you are still unsure whether an SEO strategy is good for your business or not, read-up on our success cases to see if your industry fits the profile. Maybe you want a head-start and don’t want to start spending immediately. In that case, you can go check out our How to do SEO for Free guide.

Don’t forget that the key to a good marketing strategy, is to properly identify which traffic channels you can more easily exploit. Minimize effort while you maximize lead-generation or product sales.