Here in 2023, it’s past time to fully understand, accept, and embrace the importance of SEO for growing your business. While you’ve probably heard that SEO, or search engine optimization, is a useful and necessary digital marketing tool, you may not be exactly sure what SEO entails in this day and age—or why it matters so much in the first place.
This guide breaks down what search optimization is, the importance of SEO for sustainable growth and lead generation, and how to implement best practices so that your brand is more discoverable than ever online. Curious how your website is doing in search? Request an SEO audit from our team here!
What Is SEO?
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. A higher rank when someone searches a term in your industry increases your brand’s visibility online. The increase in visibility will drive more organic traffic to your site, and this, in turn, gives you more opportunities to convert qualified prospects into customers. When done correctly, SEO can help your brand stand above others as a trustworthy company and further improve the user’s experience with your brand and website.
Why Is SEO Important?
SEO is important for brands as it’s a highly effective way to improve your brand’s visibility through search, drive more traffic to your website, establish your brand as a trusted authority in your industry, sustainably and reliably grow your business, and much more. Here’s how each of these factors contributes to the importance of SEO for your brand.
Visibility and Rankings
When searching for a service or product online, users are more likely to choose one of the top five suggestions that the search engine shows them. After all, while Google may return thousands upon thousands of search results for any given term, the vast majority of searchers never make it past the first page, and more than 25% of people click the first search result they see. SEO helps you rank higher in search results and garner more visibility online, making potential customers more likely to click over to your site and convert.
Even if users don’t visit and convert now, simply populating in the rankings will make users more familiar with your brand. In the future, they’re more likely to remember your brand name the next time they’re interested in associated products and services, and they may search for you directly.
Web Traffic
To put it simply—if potential customers can’t find your website, you miss out on sales opportunities. SEO increases your organic search engine traffic, in turn increasing the number of visitors your website sees each day. This directly correlates to an increase in sales—because the more relevant people see your site, the more chances you have to sell to them.
Trustworthy
The better optimized your site is, the higher you’ll appear on search engines like Google and Bing. While ranking higher on Google is appealing to all brands because of increased visibility, a secondary benefit is the trust you gain with potential customers. Users tend to defer to the recommendations that a search engine generates, so having a higher position for the keywords a user is searching for will solidify your product or service as trustworthy in the user’s mind.
User Experience
A well-optimized website clearly communicates what product or service is being offered, shows how to obtain it, and answers any questions surrounding it. User experience is a major ranking factor for Google. This means that by catering the site to appeal to search engines like Google and Bing, you’re also catering it to the user’s experience. This means both search engines and users are able to easily get the information they need. On the other hand, if a user struggles to navigate your site, chances are that search engines will as well.
Growth
There’s no doubt about it—SEO carries a lot of importance for the growth of your brand. As we mentioned above, the higher you rank on a search engine for a variety of high-volume keywords, the more organic (aka non-paid) web traffic your site will receive. It’s as simple as that.
A website that is well optimized is more likely to gain more customers and make more sales due to increased lead generation. People are also more likely to share your brand across other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram once they’ve found your website through a search engine.
What Are the Main Elements of Search Engine Optimization?
On-site SEO
On-site SEO refers to the improvements to be applied to the content on your site to ensure that it’s search engine friendly. When optimizing your website for search engines, you want to signal to search engines exactly what each webpage is about in a variety of ways.
With on-site SEO, you’ll deal with the structure of your website, adding keywords to various portions of each page. Some of the key areas of attention when it comes to on-site search engine optimization are:
- Keyword selection
- Content optimization
- SEO titles and meta descriptions
- Linking structure
- Image alt attributes
This is far from an exhaustive list, but let’s take a look at each item.
Keywords
In the same way that it’s hard to understate the importance of SEO for your brand, it’s also difficult to overstate the importance of the keywords you choose when it comes to the success of your SEO efforts.
Picking the right keywords for your website and content takes diligent research, and it’s critical to aim for the sweet spot of high relevance + high volume + achievable difficulty. At Alter Endeavors, we offer a full Platform to SEO package that leans on extensive keyword research to ensure the language used across your site includes high-volume keywords relevant to your industry, turning your new website into a lead generation powerhouse for your brand.
Content
The content you choose to write and share on your website is essential to reaching and engaging with your audience. Say you owned a window treatment business, like our client Austintatious Blinds does. To increase your visibility in that industry, we’d suggest a series of blogs exploring the types of window treatments, from modern window treatments to smart home automation through motorized blinds, etc.
So, when a local user searches a question concerning a type of window treatment, your blog shows up. This allows you to start a conversation with a potential customer by providing them valuable information that they are actively searching for. And when they’re ready to purchase their new window treatments, who will be the first to come to mind? You! Your content should be educational, engaging, and shareable.
The same is true for thought leaders—even more so, in some ways. Because many thought leaders don’t offer the same volume of specific services that service-based businesses do, they must drive traffic by producing thoughtful content that establishes their authority within the niche they occupy.
Meta Descriptions and SEO Titles
When Google puts together search engine results pages (or SERPs) to display to a user following their search, it doesn’t display entire webpages. Instead, it provides a curated snapshot of information (called a “snippet) to represent each page that shows up in results.