Why Does Your Business Needs SEO in 2022?

Why Businesses Need SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly powerful tool for lead generation. If you’re not using SEO as part of your marketing strategy, you may be missing out on an opportunity to obtain more quality organic leads by attracting more traffic to your website. It’s also a valuable tool for promoting brand awareness, building relationships with prospects and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your area. As 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, according to Brightedge Research, an effective SEO strategy is crucial for getting your business noticed.

What Is SEO?

SEO utilizes multiple elements, and knowing what they are as well as how they work is key to understanding why it is so important. According to HubSpot, SEO refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). It works by optimizing a website’s pages, improving keyword usage and earning inbound links. This makes your website more visible to people looking for solutions that your brand, product or service can provide via search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. However, according to HubSpot, 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results. So how do you appear in their search?

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, there are five main elements to consider in terms of SEO marketing:

• Keywords are words and phrases that prospects use to find online content. In turn, brands can utilize this information to better connect with prospects looking for their products and services. Look for keywords with high search rates and low competition, both short- and long-tail keywords and locality-based terms.
• Content is how you reach and engage your audience. Publishing regular and relevant content is key to positioning yourself in front of your desired audience when they are searching for products or services related to what you offer. Today’s content must be educational but also interesting, relevant and shareable. This includes webpage content, videos, blogs, infographics, listicles, how-to guides, whitepapers, social media and local listings.
• Off-page SEO involves external optimization practices away from your site rather than on it. This includes backlink building, where links to your site from external sites are generated and tell search engines that your site is valuable. Popular items that generate backlinks include guest blogging, infographics and influencer marketing.
• Local SEO is becoming increasingly important as many users use mobile devices to search. In fact, mobile devices account for 63% of organic search engine visits in the United States, according to Statista, with nearly half of those searches involving local intent. 
• Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to paid marketing effects with native advertisements, Google AdWords, social media ads, pay-per-click (PPC), display ads and more. It can assist your SEO efforts by reaching highly targeted audiences.

Key Benefits of SEO For Your Business

According to Forbes and Search Engine Journal, these core reasons should offer clarity as to why businesses need SEO to take their brand to the next level, regardless of the industry or business size:

• It boosts credibility: A site that ranks high on the results page is typically considered higher quality and more trustworthy, which will, in turn, increase your overall credibility online. The goal should be to establish a strong foundation for an effective user experience easily discoverable in search. 
• It helps you understand the voice of the consumer: SEO tells us what customers want and need from user behavior. This includes search query data, SERP analysis, analytics data and AI insights.
• It supports content marketing: Your site will rank better in search results by creating original and helpful content for users. Focus on producing quality content with optimized keywords to register fresh content continually.
• It maximizes paid marketing strategies (PPC): PPC helps your site appear at the top of paid search results, while SEO organically does the same. Having both boosts your credibility by positioning you higher in the search results.
• It can help you reach more people: SEO can help attract anyone with intent. If you target keywords rather than demographics, you can reach more prospects who may be interested in your products or services.
• It improves website usability: SEO focuses on making your site search engine-friendly and can also improve user experience by generating high-quality and valuable content in conjunction with optimized site speed, robust site structure and navigation.
• It improves user engagement rates: Customers will be more likely to engage with your site longer the higher quality and more user-friendly it is. Online tools can help you audit your site and optimize titles and meta tags. By optimizing your site, you will attract more quality traffic. 
• It brings light to new opportunities: High-quality SEO will help discover and leverage new opportunities for brands to stand out, such as content, digital and social opportunities to help with sales, product and customer-service strategies.
• Organic search is often the primary source of website traffic: Organic search plays a significant role in website performance and ultimately engaging or converting users. According to Optinmonster, leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (cold calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate.

Tactics for Developing SEO

Ultimately, search engines aim to deliver the best experience possible to the end-user. Keep that in mind as you develop your SEO strategy using these tactics from HubSpot:

• Conduct an audit of your website content.
• Use a keyword research tool to identify the keywords with which people are finding you.
• Target new keywords.
• Develop new content and optimize existing content.
• Monitor your website’s performance.
• Purchase inbound marketing or SEO software.
• Examine the webpages that are performing well.
• Look for opportunities to earn inbound links from similar websites.
• Monitor your change in rankings and traffic.

SEO Best Practices

Several strategies and techniques you can follow can increase the likelihood of ranking in the top 10 results for your target keywords. By following these SEO best practices from Semrush, you will be laying the groundwork for your site to increase its visibility in search. Then you can move on to more advanced keyword research and link-building strategies.

• Align your content with search intent: Search intent is the purpose behind every search query. Understanding and satisfying search intent is Google’s ultimate priority. There are four common search intent types: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. Is the user just conducting a simple search, looking for a specific website or app, looking for a particular product but hasn’t made the final decision yet or are they searching with the intent to purchase?
• Write a compelling title tag and meta description: Title tags are clickable headlines that appear in search results that are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it is relevant to their query. A meta description is a summary of a page in the SERP displayed below the title tag to generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary.
• Optimize your images: Images are crucial in improving visitors’ user experience as they contribute to your site’s overall SEO and boost organic traffic when used correctly. Make sure to choose the best file format, compress your images, provide alt text for images and utilize the lazy-load technique.
• Optimize your page speed: If your site takes a long time to load, you will have many frustrated users and your rankings might drop. Several free tools can help you check your page speed and recommend improvements for better site speed.
• Build an internal linking structure: Internal links are important because they establish an information hierarchy for your website and help Google get a deeper understanding of the content on your page.
• Improve user experience: User experience is one of the key factors in improving your search rankings. You can do so by using subheadings, making your content visually appealing, avoiding intrusive popups and using white space in your design.
• Make URLs SEO-friendly: A good URL structure gives users and search engines an idea of the destination page. 

JSMM for Your Growth Marketing Needs

We have successfully helped clients create and optimize their SEO and SEM strategies in conjunction with paid media strategies. For example, we launched a paid search campaign that gendered 20 conversions and 44 phone calls with a small budget of $500 per month for our technology-managed services client. The first phase of the campaign consisted of text and display ads. The second phase included a remarketing ad. Our team also created landing pages and optimized content on the website to help drive conversations. The client has also reported that several web leads have resulted in proposals and new business. This lead-generation program complemented other digital marketing efforts such as social media marketing, public relations, branded storytelling, email marketing, CRM integration, videos and search engine optimization.

If you’re still unsure where to begin, contact us to learn more about our capabilities and conduct an SEO audit of your website.