12 reasons why you need an SEO strategy
Posted on January 20, 2012 | No Comments
- Search can help you achieve your business goals Want more customers? More leads? More sales? The internet is a huge marketplace and consumers appear to have lost their fear of buying things via the web. Search engines are often the starting place for a product search, and they’re getting more popular. More than half of all internet users search at least once a day.
- Brand visibility / findability Don’t allow your direct or indirect competitors rank higher than you. Using tried and tested techniques you can gain high positions in search results using the power of SEO.
- Competitor activity Your competitors are likely to be investing in SEO, even if you aren’t. Competitor websites are already ahead of you with their SEO. And if they are, you need to quickly start to compete with them in this area, or they could take something of an entrenched position.
- It pays off in the long-term In the long-term, organic listings will deliver a potentially higher volume of visitors at a lower cost. Organic clicks are essentially free.
- Paid search is becoming more expensive There is greater competition in paid search these days, which means click costs have increased to a point where there is limited scope for profit. Your ability to generate ROI depends on how well you convert traffic to customers, and paid search traffic can cost a lot of money.
- People prefer the natural results Users tend to choose the natural search results in preference to the paid-search listings. Natural search attracts approximately 88% to 90% of search engine users. This figure increases for experienced users or who fall into a category of informational search behaviour. This suggests that companies who concentrate on paid listings only are limiting their visibility.
- You don’t need to come first to win It isn’t a case of ‘all or nothing’ (aka ‘first position or nothing’) with SEO, so don’t let the challenge of making it onto the first three deter you from investing in this area.
- Concerns about PPC click fraud Although the search engines have played down the significance of click fraud the perception remains that investment into paid search carries the risk of fraudulent clicks, and therefore damage to return on investment.
- People trust Google, Bing and Yahoo Specifically, people trust Google to deliver relevant results. It is the reason why Google became synonymous with search. If Google says your company is number one for a search term then in the mind of the searcher it probably is.
- Better ROI Many marketers turn to SEO investment because the ROI case for PPC is not as strong as it was due to keyword inflation.
- SEO seen as more strategic Company executives are more likely to understand the power and potential of search engines even if they are traditional marketers rather than online specialists. An estimated 80% of an average optimised website’s traffic comes from a website’s organic search engine listings.
- SEO helps you build a better website Therefore it helps you build a better user experience, if only because of the focus on what you should be doing for the maximum impact in the organic search listings. Better usability. Better fulfilment paths. Happy customers mean higher satisfaction rates and more trust. And this makes for a happier boss…
