Today, if you’re not investing in SEO, you could risk having your business fall behind. Search engine optimization is one of the top tools in any modern business’s arsenal. Not only does it allow customers to feel like they discovered you naturally, instead of being advertised to, it also adds a layer of trust that you can’t get through pay per click advertisements. While most people know that you need SEO to boost your website’s ranking and increase the amount of traffic you get, this isn’t all it does. There are tons of benefits and plenty of reasons this type of not-advertising should be on the top of your company’s to-do list. The more your business invests in SEO, the more benefits you’ll see happening that you didn’t anticipate.
Here are some unexpected benefits of SEO that can help take your business to the next level.
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Offers Solid Leads
Bringing in more leads is a goal that many businesses have, but this isn’t an easy thing to do. If you put out ad or an email chain to whatever email lists you have, you’re not guaranteed any click-throughs. By optimizing your search results, you’re giving customers the chance to come to you, already interested in your brand and eager to learn more. This plan gives you better leads, customers who are more geared towards what you can offer, and pros who know what they’re looking for. Eventually, as your website ranking begins to rise, you might start seeing more leads come in.
Adds Customer Trust
Some people might underestimate how important it is to build trust with your customers. People don’t want to risk spending their money on a business that they think won’t provide what they promise to their customers. Building trust is something that SEO can help with. SEO consulting services focus on creating a space where your customer will come to you. The higher up in search results you sit, the better chance a potential customer will notice you. Customers are known to stay on the first page of products and generally don’t click any lower than the first six results. This plan means that if you’re on the second page, they may see you as untrustworthy or less likely to have what they want. Good SEO ensures a better image for your potential customers. You’ve put in the work to earn a higher ranking, which people will notice when they see you in their search results and when they visit your website. SEO means that you’ll have a fast-loading, mobile-friendly, secure website filled with important content, which says a lot about how trustworthy your business is.
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Improves Engagement
You don’t want users to come to your website and immediately leave. It can be hard to keep anyone’s attention online today, but SEO can help you improve your user engagement. Your engagement with advertisements only goes so far if the viewers aren’t familiar with you already. If you have a good ranking in search engines like Google or Bing, there’s a high chance that if they’re into something similar to what you offer, they may recognize your brand name. By being closer to the top of a Google search, you give them the chance to remember you and think of you when your brand’s specialty comes up. What you have on your website will also help improve engagement. Content is an important part of SEO, and it’s something that a lot of users want to see today. Users are looking up questions they have all the time, and you can provide answers to their questions through the content you include on your website. This is something users will want to engage with and provides something valuable to them, which will help keep them on your website longer.
Allows You To Be a Source
Everyone wants to be thought of as experts in their respective industries, but doing this requires a lot of work. Fortunately, this is an area where SEO can pay off that not many people will think of. When companies cite their sources or look for information to include in documents and articles, the researchers usually don’t go far down the searches. They find what they need and then continue. By being close to the top of a search engine, your brand could be linked and cited as a source of information, which will lead to more customers trusting you and wanting to support your brand. As you create more valuable content to improve your SEO, you’re also creating more opportunities for people to link to your website if they think you have something important to say about a topic. Since link-building is a crucial part of many business’s SEO strategies, getting more people to link to your website when they use you as a source will help you even more. If you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, SEO is a great place to start.
If this is the case, it’s essential to ensure that you’re a good source. If your information comes up false, or a brand or customer loses their faith in you, this could ruin your company’s reputation.
Hands-Off Advertising
Although good SEO can’t be called advertising, since you’re not going out of your customer’s usual path: it’s still a style of bringing them to your website. This hands-off advertising style even takes a considerable amount of work, but you don’t have to seem like you’re trying too hard to the customers. Most millennials and gen Z kids hate being advertised to. After years of being on the internet and social media, most people know when they’re being advertised to online. Many even claim that ads can lower their trust and respect for a company. However, even though SEO is a type of digital marketing, it’s not exactly the same as what many people think marketing is. While you are paying for help improving your SEO in most cases, it’s also work that takes a lot of time and effort, so you still have to earn the ranking you have. By simply boosting your numbers in a search, you avoid the look of pandering while still gaining their clicks!
It’s Long-Term
When you invest any amount of money into something, you want to know that it will benefit you for a while. This is exactly what SEO does. While SEO might not help you see results right away, it is something that will work for your business long into the future. While you would ideally continue to improve your SEO, even if you took a break from it, you would still benefit from the work you did in the past. SEO works nonstop, even when you stop putting money into it, which isn’t true for most other types of marketing. This makes SEO well-worth the time and money you put into it.
SEO has far more to offer than you might initially think. As you optimize your website and make changes that are more SEO-friendly, you may start seeing some of these unexpected benefits of SEO that many people don’t associate with it. Start focusing on your website’s SEO today to see how it can help improve your business.