In today’s world, for your business to succeed online, you need a proper marketing plan. Before deploying any outreach effort, using social media or PPC as an example, it should be of top priority to first work on a good SEO strategy. This in return, will set a strong foundation and make your overall marketing investment worthwhile. But how do you do this and why is it so important?

What constitutes a “good” SEO strategy changes from time to time. Google’s algorithms shift frequently, so it is important for any business or agency to keep up on trends and adjust their strategy accordingly. It is important to understand how the SEO game works, and perhaps why it is different than building brand awareness on social media or in any other places online.

Below you will find 5 reasons why SEO is important for your online business.

1. SEO Brings in Quality Traffic

Anyone in the know trying to market their business in this digital age is aware that traffic only tells half the story. There is a major difference between getting a lot of views and getting quality, targeted traffic, that can drastically impact your bottom line.

One of the benefits of SEO is that it is a long-term play. You might not get one million new views overnight, but the people who discover your brand do so typically searching for a solution you offer. Several dozen or hundreds of views per week—tailored to the perfect audience—can wind up having a significant ROI value. Especially if it can do this for continuous years.

While other types of marketing efforts, like PPC, can be effective to bring traffic to your site, they are not always necessarily long-term strategies. As your page starts ranking for organic results then your PPC budget will start getting lower and become more effective.

A good SEO strategy will reward your efforts for years to come. Once settled, It will always bring in quality, targeted traffic for your brand or business.

2. It is a Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy

If you have evolved into recent trends, your business is a brand that tells a story. This is simply how brands thrive in the digital age. While this is true, it can be expensive to maintain any image that you paint. Large-scale digital strategies might not fit within your budget, so you’ll have to choose one or two strategies to pursue.

SEO is better for lean budgets. Whether you are paying for articles to be written or designing other types of optimized content, it will eventually be indexed by Google. If it is valuable to users, you could start getting hundreds to thousands of impressions on your website every single month.

Consider the recent COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how this strategy can pay off. An investment made on content several years ago—paid off when your business was operating at one hundred percent capacity—could still be bringing in new clients in these rough times. Although the name of the game in this new economy is to learn and adapt quickly, the leverage of a good SEO foundation can give you that vantage point to succeed at a faster rate.

Once you make the initial investments that get your SEO strategy rolling, a tool like SEMRush can be great for maintaining things down the road.

3. Increases Site Retention

There are many reasons why 61 percent of businesses say that a good SEO strategy is one of their top priorities. One of those reasons is that it helps bolster their website’s credibility and authority.

To build on this, search engines want to see people visit your site and stay on it. Longer retention shows the algorithm that your website is valuable and provides information that helps what the person searched for. Time spent and how the visitor flow through your website is only a couple of factors that determine content quality. In turn, site retention increases, cycling back to a better ranking for top results.

3. Increases Site Authority

It is no secret that Google changes what it asks of websites every few years. While building an optimized website, we are mostly at the mercy of what this powerful search engine says it cares about. In the most recent algorithmic changes, Google gave us three letters to keep in mind: EAT. Expertise, authority, and trust. If you can build these with the people who visit your website, Google will reward you by ranking higher organically.

Their algorithms evolve to be more powerful and intuitive as technology advances. Keeping up with these changes is imperative as it becomes the parameter that will tank or bolster any business. As an example, things like proper citations and descriptions of who wrote the article you are reading became important. Businesses often neglect this small detail, but if Google says it’s important, then it is time to adapt. In fewer words, whoever follows the rules will have a better chance at ranking than any business that does not.

A good SEO strategy will optimize your website SEO foundation and load your website with content that converts. This in turn will make your domain trustworthy in Google’s roster and will help you rank higher and give you more organic traffic down the road.

4. A Good SEO Strategy is Trackable

At the end of the day, you want to see a return on your investment. SEO, perhaps more than some other digital marketing strategies, is quite easy to measure. There is no guesswork, and you always come out with information that can be used to optimize your strategy even further.

Whether you are working with an SEO agency or doing it on your own, there are plenty of tools that can help measure your success. This is another reason why a good SEO tool like SEMRush can be helpful. You’ll be able to manage all analytics in one spot and gain other in-depth insights to help improve your plan. In other words, you will have a machine working on your side to tell you what you need along the way to improve your SEO strategy. Without investing in additional tools, you can simply keep an eye on how much organic traffic you are getting monthly for the efforts you have accomplished. 

Again, this plays into the core strength of SEO. It is a long game that can be adjusted and coerced as you go along. If a piece of content is not ranking or something is driving organic traffic away from your website, you can easily adjust and improve.

5. Helps Increase Local SEO 

It is a simple fact that not as many brick and mortar businesses these days are doing well. But even if your entire operation is run online, it cannot hurt to bolster your presence in the city or region where your company is located.

Local SEO helps give you credibility in the community. It can also piggyback off other SEO-related entities like Google Maps and Yelp, helping to drive targeted local traffic to your product.

Everyone knows that it is easy for your content to get lost on the internet. It can take an exceptionally long time for a small business to start standing out. However, one proven way is to establish authority in one specific region first, then expand.

Once more, you can point to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of why this is important. If the unexpected happens, who is most likely to step up and try to help your business? Local community members—that is who.

Good SEO Strategy

As you can see, there are several reasons that a solid SEO strategy for your business will pay off handsomely.

From bringing in targeted quality organic traffic to your site to becoming more credible in the eyes of Google, search engine optimization is something your business will benefit from.

The key is to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy. In fact, its greatest strengths lie in the fact that it is this way. Instead of going all in and hoping for a big boom, you can test and retest, adjust, and see what’s working along the way.

For more tips on how to build great SEO content for your business, visit this page. We wish you the best of luck!