5 Reasons Why SEO is Incredibly Valuable to Your Business

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the cornerstones of any digital marketing strategy. Prior to the age of the Internet, one of the most significant challenges for businesses lay in identifying where exactly customers were looking for their preferred goods and services. With many potential business leads now beginning in the form of an online search, there’s little doubt left that the digital sphere provides many commercial opportunities for those who understand how best to capitalise on them.

The need to place your business in front of potential customers has remained largely unchanged, but the methods of doing so have changed dramatically. The practice of SEO – which is aimed at increasing a website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) – is one of the most important methods of reaching potential customers. Here are 5 reasons why SEO is incredibly valuable to your business.

1. Google is the Most-Visited Website in the World

In order to understand why SEO is an important strategy for any modern business, we must first take a look at the incredible value of search engines themselves – why else would a business even consider spending precious resources on optimising for them?

Search engines play an important role in our daily lives, offering answers to our queries at the click of a button. According to statistics supplied by Alexa, Google is the most-visited website in the world, earning more than 9 daily unique page views per visitor at the time of writing.

As if that weren’t enough, Google now processes an estimated 3.5 billion searches on a daily basis. Although it dominates the search engine market with a share of more than 90%, this number doesn’t even take account of searches being conducted through rival search engines such as Bing.

Although the above number includes search queries of all kinds, searches for specific products or services have become extremely common. For this reason, optimising your website to increase your visibility in search engines is the first step towards capitalising on this vast online audience.

2. Organic Search Helps to Drive Website Traffic

Whenever you type a given query into a search engine, the Search Engine Results page will generally show several different types of results. Searchers will first notice a list of ads at the top of the page, which represent paid search engine results. The list of results directly below them are referred to as ‘organic results’, which include results that have been ranked on the basis of quality, content, and more often than not, strong SEO.

These organic results play an important role in driving traffic to your website. One study found that organic search accounts for more than half of all website visitors, leaving behind other sources such as paid search and social.

Even more impressively, the same study found that its role is even greater in attracting traffic to business service pages, contributing as much as 73% to the total number of visitors. Optimising your website for search engines can go a long way in determining your visibility in organic searches, illustrating the importance of SEO in bringing in traffic.

3. SEO Results are Measurable

For most businesses, obtaining measurable results will often be the determining factor in deciding on how best to invest in their digital marketing strategy. The availability of tools such as Google Analytics and SEMrush means that measurability is one of the most significant benefits of SEO. By gaining insight into how their digital marketing tactics are contributing towards achieving business goals, businesses are able to see the ways in which SEO services are working for them.

4. SEO is Cost-Effective

Aside from bringing in organic traffic, SEO is also widely considered to be the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy. An important reason for this is that SEO will often focus on getting your website ranking for a specific set of search terms.

If, for example, you’re in the business of providing musical entertainment for events, you may well want to focus on improving your rankings for the search term ‘bands for hire’. In most cases, this search term already shows significant user intent, meaning that most people who search for it are likely to be in the market for hiring a band.

By using SEO to improve your visibility for this specific search term, you’ll be in a better position to win business whilst minimising costs. In order to further maximise return on investment, many businesses choose to enlist the expertise of an SEO agency to help them achieve their commercial goals.

5. Competitors Are Beating You to It

The modern marketplace is fiercely competitive, and businesses are expected to pull out all the stops in order to meet the needs of their customers. As more and more consumers look to search engines to find the products and services they’re looking for, commercial organisations of all kinds have been quick to move in.

This holds true throughout virtually every sector of the economy. The war for consumers’ business is increasingly being fought out online, and SEO is one of your most valuable assets in ensuring you’re on the winning side of it. Without it, the stage is set for your competitors to reap the rewards instead.