Before we reason why your business needs SEO, let’s look at the fact that 75% of internet users never go past the first page of search results. This means if a business is not on the first page, it is losing out on online visibility.
In a nutshell, your business’s online visibility depends on getting to that coveted first page. This is where SEO comes in.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to increase its visibility in organic search results for specific keywords. The term ‘Organic’ here means without paying for the traffic that comes to your website.
Search engines like Google use crawlers to collect information about a page and answer user queries. An SEO expert or an agency helps optimize the page with relevant keywords, content, metadata, and builds credible backlinks so that search engines prioritize your website while responding to a user’s query.
In this guide, we discuss why your business needs professional SEO services to stay ahead of your competitors.
Key Takeaways
- SEO aids businesses in appearing on the top of SERPs and standing out in their competitive online space.
- SEO might take time to show results, but the impact is long-term. Thus, businesses should invest in professional SEO services.
- SEO experts or agencies help optimize your web pages for keywords, content, metadata, and backlinks, eventually helping your website’s web pages to be prioritized by search engines.
- As users / potential customers see your website in Google search results for their queries, it builds familiarity and trust for your brand, leading to better conversions.
- Investing early in SEO yields long-term advantages, making it harder for your competitors to catch up.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- 11 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO Services
- When SEO isn’t Right for You?
- Why Choose Zestard As Your SEO Agency?
11 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO Services
Investing in SEO services offers a plethora of benefits. If you wonder how SEO can help your business, here is a detailed breakdown:
1. Increases Organic Traffic And Revenue from Search Engines
A study by Hubspot showed that organic was the top source of traffic for all websites and a core component of the sales funnel.
So, a well-thought-out SEO strategy, in line with Google’s ranking factors, can help your website reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract targeted traffic and business.
The above graph shows how SEO helped a SaaS-based website gain organic traffic of about 250K in the span of 12 months through content marketing activity.
Read this entire SEO Case Study here – SAAS Content Marketing Case Study – How We Increased 250K Organic Visitors in 12 Months
2. Builds Trust And Credibility
Ranking at the top of Google searches with a well-optimized website helps build trust and credibility about the brand in the customers’ perception. For instance, when people search for any product, and your website appears on the first page of organic results, it helps potential customers to identify your brand. And, if you provide helpful content regarding your products on your website that solves your customers’ confusion and queries, it even showcases you as an expert in your domain, and it improves your brand awareness and credibility.
In other words, the higher you rank on Google and other search engines, the more trustworthy your brand is to people who search for your products or services.
3. SEO Helps You Reduce Your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
For most businesses, when starting off, or even for existing ones, the go-to approach to acquire more customers is performance marketing. This approach is effective for immediate visibility and perhaps sales, often results in a higher Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) due to the continuous expenses tied to every click through paid advertising. The higher you pay, the higher the results. However, this expense keeps adding up in the long run.
SEO, on the other hand, is a channel that can start to give you free website traffic once the keyword starts ranking in Google. Having a stream of organic or free traffic significantly reduces your CAC.
As per Hubspot, SEO is one of the most effective strategies for reducing your CAC.
4. SEO Improves User Experience
SEO’s focus is not just optimizing your website for search engine algorithms but also determining users’ intent. SEO helps in improving websites’ loading time, updating relevant content, providing vital information in a way that’s easy to spot, optimizing the meta tags and CTAs, reducing technical glitches, organizing the site and page structure, etc. It helps your potential customers get what they want on your website quicker, enabling you to rank better. Resultantly, you gain more traffic from Google and other search engines.
Google has also laid more importance to best user experience by introducing the Core Web Vitals. As per Google, “Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page”. The core web vitals consists of three metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which helps us measure the loading performance, Interaction To Next Paint (INP) which us measure responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to help us measures visual stability.
5. Diversify Your Marketing Channel
Sole reliance on a single channel can pose significant risks. Therefore, you must prioritize diversifying your marketing channels to safeguard against unforeseen challenges.
For instance, imagine you generate all your sales only through Facebook Ads, and Facebook suspends your account one day for no apparent reason. Your new sales stop since you do not have another channel, and you panic over what else can be done to resolve the issue. What if your Facebook ads account is suspended for 7-10 days? You can imagine how much your bottom line will suffer.
As a result, diversifying your marketing channels is necessary so that even if one marketing channel is interrupted, you still have a second one to continue your business operations.
6. Gain A Competitive Advantage
It’s important to note that SEO is a long-term investment, often taking around 4-12 months to yield significant results.
However, this patience pays off. Investing in SEO provides a strategic advantage over competitors who predominantly depend on limited marketing channels, such as paid ads, social media, or email marketing.
Once you’ve devoted the time and effort to building your organic presence, any competitor starting their SEO journey at this point will find it challenging to overtake you.
Unlike in PPC and other paid acquisition strategies where competitors can swiftly outbid you, the head start you gain in SEO offers a more durable competitive edge.
7. Understand The Customer’s Persona
The process of developing an SEO strategy begins with extensive keyword research and into how users search for a product or service online. While doing so, SEO professionals gauge the user intent, demographics, and behavioral aspects like the language and technology they use to find information about a product or service.
SEO professionals also focus on other insights about the website, including the pages the users visit, their length of stay on the page, and the point at which they choose to leave the site.
These SEO metrics offer valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors that you can use to scale your offerings and better target your customers. This compelling point explains the importance of SEO for your business.
8. Boost Your Local Businesses
If you have a physical store and want to rank on Google Local Map Pack, it is essential for you to optimize your website. There’s when Local SEO comes to the play.
Local SEO is the process of improving search engine visibility for local businesses, primarily those with physical stores. Some of the best local SEO tips include creating pages with localized content, using local keywords, using the names of local areas on your website, and creating backlinks from the local organization’s website. You can reach out to your nearby NGO, local grocery stores, and sports club for local link building, and in return, you can offer them sponsorship and even write a blog post on their website. It will boost your ranking on Google Maps and improve the footfall at your store.
Furthermore, there are high chances that if your website ranks well organically, it will rank well on the local map pack. So, it’s important that you optimize your website well and stay updated with Google’s Core Updates so the website remains aligned with them. This will help you bring online success to your local business.
9. SEO Ensures Your Website is Aligned with Google’s Latest Updates
Google is everchanging its search algorithm to improve its users’ experience. Google launched several Core Updates and Algorithm Updates in 2023 and 2024. Hence, your business’s website must align with the core updates to avoid penalties. The Google penalty can result in downgrading your website’s ranking or even deindexing the entire website.
Gone are the days when SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, directory listings, spammy content, etc, would make no difference in your ranking. Now, Google has strict regularizations for quality content, backlinks, and overall user experience. Hence, it is time to transform your business’s SEO strategies and marketing efforts.
Today, a specialist needs to make several SEO efforts for on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. They need to perform keyword analysis to find the target keywords to improve the organic rankings of your business. The keywords are selected well after understanding the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, prospective customers, and other websites belonging to your competitors.
SEO Analysts need to optimize meta titles, meta descriptions, internal links, and external links and publish high-quality content in a timely manner for most search terms. They also do other SEO efforts, such as manual link building, pitching PR websites like HARO (now Connectively), outreach for guest blog posts, etc.
Read here what is HARO and about its case study!
Technical SEO is a critical component of SEO that ensures your website’s health is optimal. The SEO team ensure that your website has no issues like low page speed, broken links, NoIndex tag on meta robots, and multiple redirects to boost organic search traffic.
10. SEO Helps in Digital PR
SEO is a multidimensional technique that is evolving continuously. Digital marketing efforts are not limited to content and link building but have expanded to digital PR. Just like traditional PR, when businesses used to put advertisements in newspapers, radio, and television to promote their products and brand awareness, digital PR aims to build links on high-authority websites with a traffic of millions or more.
Gaining a backlink from such websites can bring your website’s referral traffic and even improve your reputation among your potential customers.
11. Stick Through The Buyer’s Journey
It must be noted that customers do not follow a standardized path in their journey to finding a product or service they need.
Since Digital Marketing expert already understands the user intent and their journey on your website, this data helps them identify the path followed by your potential customer base before they purchase your product/service.
They can align the SEO strategy accordingly, make the required optimizations to the site pages, or even create new product pages that are more action-oriented to match the buyer’s intent. This efforts results in the better organic search rankings on Google and other search engines.
Want to boost your website’s traffic and visibility?
Give Zestard a try to improve your brand’s online presence and fulfil all your digital marketing needs.
When SEO isn’t Right for You?
Now that you are aware of SEO importance, you should also know when SEO may not be right for you:
1. When You Are Looking For Immediate Results
SEO is a long-term strategy and requires undeviating effort, unlike PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Crafting high-quality content, building authoritative links, and optimizing your website takes time. Search engines also take their own time to crawl and associate pages for certain queries and rank them.
According to Google, it can take anywhere between 4 to 12 months to see the results after the implementation of SEO practices. So if you require immediate results, consider other channels like PPC or paid social media campaigns.
2. When You Don’t Have Time To Monitor The Results
SEO strategy requires periodic monitoring, reviewing, and revamping. So, it is important to spend time reviewing the results demonstrated by SEO professionals and help them with the required information and insights to further support their efforts.
Why Choose Zestard As Your SEO Agency?
Zestard is a leading SEO agency with a proven record of enabling 100+ brands to establish their strong digital presence and deliver consistent results. With a customized SEO plan developed based on the specific attributes of your business, the SEO team at Zestard will help you rank for potential keywords that matter to your business.
Zestard also undertakes a wide suite of services across the entire spectrum, from audit, keyword research, and content gap analysis to optimization and link building services.
If you are exploring ways to enhance your search engine rankings and draw more leads and prospects, Zestard is your go-to place to outsource SEO services.
If you are still wondering why your business needs SEO services, get in touch with our experts and explore more about our SEO services today.
