5 Benefits of SEO for Business Growth
5 Benefits of SEO for Business Growth
Greg Walthour, Co-CEO • Intero Digital • August 26, 2022
SEO is among the most vital parts of an effective online marketing strategy. Here are some of the SEO benefits you might miss out on if you’re not utilizing it on your website.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two decades (or you’ve been cryogenically frozen), you probably have an idea of what SEO is, or, as your mother calls it when she’s upset, “search engine optimization.” Thanks to a scrappy startup named Google, it’s a huge deal now. Maybe you’ve seen their website, too.
Although the digital landscape has changed drastically since search engine marketing became a phenomenon (it’s probably even changed since you began reading this blog post), SEO has remained a compelling and vital marketing strategy.
We’re confident in saying that SEO is one of the most valuable and critical marketing strategies.
What exactly is SEO marketing?
Simply put, SEO marketing is all about getting qualified users to come to your website by optimizing how well your site ranks on search engine results pages.
A fundamental importance is that SEO marketing increases organic traffic from people doing searches online instead of paid search traffic, which is driven by pay-per-click ads.
If you’re unsure why this matters, you’ve come to the right place.
Regardless of how much — or little — you know about SEO, we’re here to answer some of your questions.
Benefits of SEO for Business Growth
While there are many benefits of a good SEO strategy, we’ve outlined five of them to help you acknowledge (or remind you!) why SEO is simply fantastic.
SEO benefit 1: Increase valuable traffic to your site.
They say it’s lonely at the top. But is it?
When it comes to search engine marketing, it’s the opposite. There are a lot of people up there.
- The first three Google search results get 54% of all clicks.
- The first search result on mobile gets 27.7% of clicks, while the second gets 9.2%.
- Moving up one spot can increase the click-through rate by 32.3%.
- 75% of people using Google never reach the search engine results page’s second page.
- Over half of site traffic stems from organic search.
So it’s not surprising that one of the main objectives of SEO is to push your site into the most coveted three spots on the SERP. These spots on the first page receive the most impressions and clicks. Placing in these high ranks can result in a significant increase in traffic.
The benefit is a surge of visitors coming to your site, seeing your products, and learning more about your brand.
But the benefits of SEO don’t stop there.
Another goal of SEO focuses solely on creating exciting search snippets.
SEO uses educational and keyword-relevant title tags and meta descriptions that can help drive traffic to your site and attract the correct type of customers. These people are most likely to read what you’re writing and buy what you’re selling.
Optimized tags and descriptions help increase the click-through rate and qualified web traffic.
So let SEO take you higher. The view is fantastic up here.
SEO benefit 2: Generate a higher return on your investment.
SEO provides absurd amounts of trackable and quantifiable results. This is also true for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce sites. These work toward one end: improving your ROI.
One of the most prominent misconceptions about SEO is that you’re guaranteed more significant returns quickly, making it a must for every company. But does it improve the bottom line instantly?
Well, it depends!
On average, companies gain more revenue from organic searches than any other traffic source. It’s been reported that 40% of companies make money from organic traffic. But it took time and effort to achieve these results.
But raking in the dollar bills isn’t the only benefit to your ROI when you implement SEO strategies.
With SEO, you can keep track of almost every aspect of your marketing strategy, like increases in traffic, rankings, and conversions. You can even see demographic information and other individual engagement data.
For e-commerce sites, SEO analytics can show which methods users use when purchasing your products, down to the keyword they used to find your product. For non-e-commerce sites, you can assign values to your lead conversions. For example, you can see your conversion rate, which came from the contact form on your website.
All this data is valuable and especially important in times of economic uncertainty.
These comprehensive analytics allow you to know the value of your SEO strategy and provide insight into the best strategies to grow your business in almost every conceivable way.
SEO benefit 3: It’s a cost-effective strategy.
SEO is among the marketing strategies that offer the best bang for your buck. This is partly due to its inbound nature, which can help businesses save more money than outbound strategies.
For example, cold-calling.
While cold-calling can still be a convenient outbound marketing approach, only 16% of businesses saw a high ROI from outbound marketing.
Also, no one’s going to be rude to you. That’s what we call a win-win.
And because SEO targets users actively looking for your products and services on the internet, the traffic brought about by SEO tends to be more qualified than traffic that comes from many other marketing strategies. This results in even more cost savings.
SEO benefit 4: Improve site usability.
SEO also makes your website easier to navigate for both users and search engines.
One aspect of optimizing on-page is rearranging a site’s architecture to make pages easier to spot and access. This improves the search engine crawlers’ efficiency when they index your site and makes it a more user-friendly website overall.
Because, you see, SEO isn’t just about backlinks and keywords. It’s about creating a positive user experience (how visitors interact with your services, brand, and products). The more you improve the experience, the more your returns will also improve.
A sound SEO strategy decreases bounce rates, increases time spent on the site, optimizes conversion rates, and boosts page load speed, all of which add up to an outstanding user experience.
This is incredibly huge, given that Google utilizes a mobile-first indexing strategy. This means Google now positions your site based on the mobile experience it provides.
Over 59% of web traffic is from mobile devices. Yet 24% of the most popular sites aren’t mobile-friendly. That means there’s immense potential to outrank many sites by equipping yours with a more mobile-focused user experience.
Your visitors will love it, search engines will love it, and you will love it.
SEO benefit 5: Build your brand’s awareness and credibility.
High rankings for your website translates to more reach for your brand.
Being on the first page for your primary keywords helps users associate your brand with those keywords and builds trust. After all, companies on the first page are usually perceived as more trustworthy.
One of the other benefits of SEO is that it makes the competition fair.
There was a time several years ago when it took a lot of work for smaller businesses to compete with more prominent companies because of the disparity in their marketing budgets. But SEO is a tool that gives everyone a shot to succeed.
If your pages rank among the top three SERP placements, especially for competitive keywords, it can boost your reputation instantly and convey trustworthiness.
After all, you wouldn’t be at the foremost ranks in the SERP unless you were famous and credible. Or at least that’s how the top positions are regarded. This is because, in reality, popularity plays no part in it. You need an outstanding SEO team.
So the more often your pages and content rank highly in search results, the more chances you have for a prospective customer to see your website and learn more about your brand.
All this adds up to more clicks, conversions, and pizza. Lots and lots of pizza.
So how can SEO benefit your business? There are a lot of benefits of incorporating SEO into your digital marketing strategy. But these top five SEO benefits take the slice, which is why many companies prioritize SEO in their inbound marketing efforts this year.
If you still aren’t sure whether SEO could help your website generate more impressive results or if you have questions about the proper ways to implement it, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free SEO consultation. We can fill you in on exactly what you need in order to make the most of all the benefits of SEO.
