Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore SEO for Your Business

Krista Neher

Jun 19 2018

Search Engine Optimization is one of the foundations of a strong digital marketing strategy – yet many businesses get so caught up in chasing down the sexy, new, exciting areas of digital marketing that they forget the foundations.

Search continues to be one of the most important parts of any digital marketing toolbox and with search engines changing constantly, it isn’t something you can simply forget about. (If you want to learn more check out our SEO Training Course)

How Important is SEO?

Search again accounts for more website traffic vs. Facebook and importantly brings MOTIVATED buyers to your website. It is one of the few things you can do to connect with people right when they are interested (instead of trying to create interest via traditional media).

Consider these mind-blowing stats:

• 51% of website traffic on average comes from organic search (Bright Edge)
• 33% of organic search traffic goes to the website in the 1st position on a search page (Search Engine Journal)
• 92% of organic search traffic goes to websites listed on the 1st page of a search page (Chitika)

How Can You Improve Your Search Results?

It used to be that you could hire a search company that could implement all sorts of “tricks” to help your website rank. But over time, as search engines have become smarter it is more and more challenging to use quick and simple tactics to rank your site.

These days ranking your site is about 3 things (which we call the ART of SEO in our SEO Training Course)

• Authority – Make sure that your site and content are seen as important by Google. There is so much content out there that Google ranks the most important content first. Focus on links and social shares to signal to Google that your site is important. Use the help of SEO-improving websites like Spamzilla.
• Relevance – Be relevant for the topic with good, quality content. Keep in mind that you can earn quality traffic with a variety of natural language terms – it isn’t just about keyword stuffing anymore.
• Technical – Your site must technically be setup right if you want to get results. Make sure that your site is optimized for search engines like Google and that it is FAST and has a good user experience.

 

What can You Do as A Business Leader or Marketer?

It used to be that you could hire a search company that could implement all sorts of “tricks” to help your with your SEO. These days if you want real results you need to consider a few things:

1. Make sure you meet the basic technical requirements with your website.
2. Have a clear strategy of what you want to rank for (keywords, phrases, questions)
3. Integrate these into your site
4. Incorporate SEO into all of your digital marketing strategies – PR, Social Media, Videos – EVERYTHING you do has an SEO component.
5. Publicity helps – look for opportunities to grow people talking about your business (preferably positively)

And it doesn’t hurt to educate yourself – at least on the basics. Make sure that you understand how SEO works so that you can integrate it into everything. If you really want to rank your business you should be thinking about search beyond just your website – but everything you do should support growing your traffic from search engines.

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