It is amazing, but there are many businesses out there who still don’t believe that optimizing their site is worth their time. Well, I’m here to tell you that an SEO campaign is both worth your time, and if done right will justify itself ten-fold in terms of dollars and cents later on.
There are several ways that an effective SEO campaign can help you’re business. In fact, many aspects of SEO are intertwined and interdependent. Here are just a few ways that I think an effect search engine optimization campaign can help:
1. Raised Awareness
The goal of search engine optimization is to increase your site’s traffic, and move your site up in the rankings. If it is done effectively, you’re site may even achieve Top 10, Top 5, or even #1 rankings for highly competitive terms.
Why is your ranking relevant? According to SEOMoz, 62% of search engine users click on a search result on the 1st page, with 28% clicking a result on page 2 or 3. Even if a user doesn’t click on your site, if you’re on the first page somewhere you are still top of mind.
Depending on whether or not you chose the right keywords for your SEO campaign, top placement gained through effective SEO could make a world of difference for your business. Simply stated, top placement means more eyeballs (a.k.a. more awareness) to your site (a.k.a. your business).
2. More Overall Traffic
As I stated above, increased traffic is one of the goals that all good SEO campaigns can bring. If you hire the right SEO person, they should be able to do a couple things:
- Help you identify your core keywords
- Help you target keywords that people are searching for
- Help you understand how people are finding you
- Help you identify the long-tailed keywords that you should target
- Help you identify the most effective keywords to targets (that is, the keywords that receive the highest volume of searches in combination with the lowest amount of competition)
All of these different tactics are ways that a good SEO can bring more traffic to your site, and I think I can confidently say that most sites utilize only some and not all of these tactics. This means that there are always more quality ways out there to pull more overall traffic to your site.
3. More Qualified Traffic
Search Engine Optimization will also help you pull in more qualified traffic to your site. I believe that you can define qualified based on user intent…
If a user is looking for your services or company and finds your site, that would be qualified traffic. If a user is looking for some other than what you do and finds your site, then that would be unqualified.
For example, if you sell auto parts in Columbus, the you would want to show up in the Top 10 for the term, “auto parts columbus Ohio.” However, showing up for “car dealer Columbus” may not help you.
I know that was probably a little confusing, but a good SEO will be able to craft your site’s titles, meta tags, content, etc. to ensure that you show up for the searches that best fit your business. From this, a higher percentage of users looking for your service will find you, rather than simply stumbling onto your site when searching for some unrelated term.
4. More Leads
If all things are equal, a good SEO campaign should increase your total number of leads by default.
For example, say that 2% of your visitors convert and you get 300 visits per month (6 leads). Now let’s say nothing changes on in terms of conversion percentages, but your site’s traffic increases by 50%.
Now you’re getting 450 visits per month and if the conversion percentage holds strong (which unless something drastic happens it should) you should get around 9 leads. That’s an increase of 3 leads just by default with no design changes involved. Now project that number out a little farther and imagine a large conversion rate or larger numbers of visitors. The numbers could be pretty staggering.
5. More Conversions
In addition, good SEO’s write page titles and meta tags that are a highly accurate reflection of what is actually on the page a user visits. I know it may be hard to believe, but many website’s titles can be very misleading in terms of what is on the actual page.
Since you literally have an instant to make an impression on a site visitor, it’s important to give them what they want. If you were a user looking for auto parts, you wouldn’t want to click on a site that is supposed to be about auto parts, only to reveal a page talking about pizza. Frankly, that would piss me off! However, if the page is what is says it’s about, then I’d be more likely to convert as a customer.
Hope this helps!
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