What is the REAL Value of SEO For Your Business?

BrightEdge research reports that organic search continues to be the leading source for website traffic with an average traffic share of 53% across the internet. Based on that one metric alone, all companies should be investing resources in search engine optimization (SEO) for their websites. But business owners often overlook SEO for alternative methods for driving website traffic, like PPC and social media because of their more immediate feedback loop.

So, let’s take a look at the real value of SEO for your business.

What is Organic Search?

Organic search results are the listings that appear on a search engine results page when your customer does an internet search. These are not the Ads that are listed above and below the organic listings. Those ad listings are often ignored by internet searchers, because they are not trusted as much as the organic listings.

The organic listings that one sees on the search page results appear in a ranked fashion based on hundreds of search variables such as relevance to the search term, the rank of the website domain, the links from other websites, and visitor activity while on the web page.

Search engine optimization is a process of maximizing as many of these search variables as possible on a website to help it onto page 1 of the relevant searches in order to get found.

Organic Search Continues to Dominate

So, why is organic search so important?

Over the last 5-8 years, organic search traffic has surpassed all other forms of website traffic channels, outpacing Paid Search (PPC) and social media.

In the B2B sector, combined search traffic accounts for 76% of trackable website traffic. In addition, stats show that B2B and Tech companies generate TWICE the revenue from organic search than from any other online channel.

All of this increased activity in organic search is generally attributed to Google’s investment in enhancing the user experience. They are trying to the most accurate and relevant search results increase the search experience. This investment on their part has also included their efforts to make their algorithms harder to be ‘hacked’ by ‘Black Hat’ SEO efforts.

According to Brightedge, “With the advent of Google’s RankBrain, its ability to map Internet content to search query intent has improved even further. As a result, consumers trust Google and rely on it even more and are using it at a rate that exceeds the growth of display and organic social.”

The Top 3 Ways You can Improve Website Traffic with SEO

SEO can be a daunting process for many small business owners. They feel like they don’t have the resources or knowledge to get their website to rank higher in search engine results pages.

There are literally hundreds of variables that you can ‘tweak’ in order to improve your site’s SEO and increase your website traffic. However, here are three main ways that you can improve your site’s SEO and increase your website traffic. These methods include:

1. Optimizing your content for search engines. Each new page of content on your website provides another opportunity to rank your website for a target keyword term/phrase. Make sure that each page (old and new) are analyzed for a keyword and optimized (and generally rewritten) to optimize the page.
   
2. Creating good links from other sites to yours. This is one of the more difficult methods for improving your site’s online search visibility, but it should be explored. Look for opportunities to gain ‘inbound’ links from more established websites back to your website. This tells the search engine that your website has content on it that other people want to read. And if you have links from low ranking websites, it would be best to request that website to take down that link, as it will negatively influence your overall website rankings.
   
3. Make sure that your website is ‘mobile ready’ and can load fast. This is one of the methods that generally requires some knowledge and tools that the general business person does not have the time to deal with. But, to engage with your audience online, they are performing more and more web searches on mobile devices. If either your website user experience and load time is poor. you will lose visitors and decline in the search algorithms.

The value of SEO to your Business’s Bottom Line?

SEO is a key part of any modern digital marketing strategy. It enables businesses to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords relevant to their business, which can lead to an increase in organic traffic to the business website and, ultimately, create more opportunities to obtain lead conversions.

B2B businesses and Tech companies are seeing twice the revenue from organic search traffic than from other online channels. This makes organic search an extremely important part of a business growth strategy.

As you plan your business sales and marketing budget, be sure to include a budget line item for organic search. It is a business investment that continues to pay dividends months and even years after you have paid for it.