It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees in the world of online marketing. The business owners we work with sometimes tell us they can feel as if they were running through tasks and campaigns just for the sake of it.
However, it’s important to remember that your business website doesn’t exist to show off your artistic instincts (or ours). It’s there to help you generate new leads, sales, or even walk-in visits. Likewise, the point of search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just to improve your visibility on Google. Instead, the goal needs to be improving conversions on your pages. Otherwise, how would it ever be worth the investment of time and money?
When you’re in the process of researching search terms, developing content, and working on the technical aspects of your website, that perspective can be hard to maintain. So today, we here at Maxburst, a New York-basedWeb Design Agency, wants to give you a handful of concrete ways that a strong SEO effort can boost conversions and put more money into your pocket.
Here are a few of the most important business-level benefits…
Better SEO Means More Traffic to Your Website
The biggest payoff from embarking on a successful SEO campaign, of course, is that it can mean bringing more visits to your website. Most online marketing industry experts agree that having a top-five position on Google (for a targeted search term) can increase web traffic by as much as 500% from a second-page ranking.
That means that even if all other things were equal, using smart search visibility strategies could give you five times as many chances to win new customers… or more, if you don’t currently have a strong search position to start with. That kind of improvement can only mean good things for your bottom line.
It should also be pointed out that we don’t think you should ever settle for just increasing the amount of traffic to your website. You should be looking to generate a higher percentage of conversions, too. By making that a focus of your SEO strategy, you might be able to see even bigger gains.
When you have many times more buyers than you used to arrive on your website, and a higher percentage of them converting into leads or sales, great things happen.
With Strong SEO, You Can Attract Better Leads or Buyers
Another reason to love search engine optimization is that it can give you better leads or customers than you have gotten in the past. That’s because your strategy shouldn’t focus only on volume, but also on quality.
Too many business owners – not to mention the web designers who advise them – only look at raw traffic numbers when trying to determine the effectiveness of a search or social campaign. However, because conversions are the ultimate goal, it pays to take a step back and see the bigger picture. That means researching keywords and search word combinations that signal buying intent or a preference for certain types of products or services.
When you can follow a narrower approach to SEO you can often weed out searchers who might not be a good fit for what you have to offer. That means less time spent chasing down sales opportunities that aren’t as strong and fewer returns and negative reviews.
Additionally, the more targeted you are with your search visibility plan the easier it is for you to stay ahead of your less-focused competitors on Google, even if they are spending more time and money on their websites.
Better Search Visibility Means More Market Awareness
You have undoubtedly heard that it takes an average of 7 to 10 impressions before a new potential customer will notice your business. With a strong SEO plan in place, you can get those repeated opportunities to get visitors to your website and win the sale.
Targeting your search strategy carefully means narrowing in on a specific type of buyer and demographics, not just paying attention to a slim set of keywords. As a result, you can often get your best prospects to return to your pages again and again as they research ideas and start to identify potential solutions.
The more someone finds you on Google and engages with your content, the more likely they become to ultimately decide to do business with you. One of the key steps to making a sale in any business is being in front of your customer at the right place and the right time. A strong SEO strategy makes that easier to manage.
A Smart SEO Strategy Helps You Find (and Fix) Website Problems
Although business owners understandably tend to focus on certain aspects of SEO like keyword research and analytics reports, it’s important to remember that priming your pages for search visibility involves looking at the technical aspects of a website, too.
In other words, if you want to rank well in Google you had better ensure your website loads quickly, that your layout is mobile-friendly, and that you don’t have broken links or duplicate content for automated search software to find (as examples). As it turns out, these are issues that will hurt your credibility and marketing power when it comes to real-life customers, as well. So, discovering and repairing any issues with your website as part of the SEO process can be beneficial to all your online marketing efforts.
What’s good for SEO is good for your website and internet marketing strategy as a whole. You might say the fact that you’ll get more visits, better leads, and an increased flow of conversions to your website just makes it an even better investment.
Is Your SEO Campaign Delivering the Results You Expect?
As we mentioned at the start of this article, strong search engine optimization isn’t just about having more people see your website on Google. That’s the first step, of course, but the real idea is to increase the number of conversions coming to you through your online content.
If those aren’t the kinds of results you are getting from your organic search engine optimization campaigns already, now might be a good time to start looking for better advice.
