Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
A website that sits on page 5 or 6 of a search result, and never grows nor ranks better, is not a worthwhile investment. A website is an important part of your set of marketing tools and a marketing strategy that does not include SEO (search engine optimisation) is nothing less than sub-par. In our instant access world, up to 97% of people are researching their desired product or service on the web before they make a purchase. By helping you capture these potential clients an effective and easy-to-find website fulfils a critically important role to the future growth of your business.
SEO consists of ongoing processes that need to be applied consistently and diligently to your website in order for it to to rank well on a search engine. These include finding keywords that relate to your business and using them to optimise content, building back-links, crafting a social media presence, improving the load time of your website and the quality of your media content as well as other smaller technical tweaks.
As mentioned before, you want to have your website as near the top of a search result as possible. As of 2010, 94% of Google users will click on one of the first page results. This means that only 6% of Google users will even look at the second page of search results. Thus, the effectiveness of your site is heavily affected by your ranking.
SEO will help your website climb up the Google rankings. Notice the massive difference in traffic generated by the first page of search results (94%) as opposed to the second page results (6%). This proves that growth in website ranking is linked to a positive non-linear growth in traffic.
A common consensus amongst internet users is that websites that rank on the first and second pages of Google are more reputable and the most popular among clients. SEO helps you to build your brand’s trustworthiness and reputation and creates the perception of your company being the go-to company in your field.
People research before buying a product and somewhere someone is possibly trying to find out what your business offers as you read this. If your company’s website does not rank well and isn’t visible to them, you will lose out on business opportunities.
Competitors are no longer merely physical or store-based, as a growing online threat is now a major factor to consider. Should your competitor’s website outranks yours, you can be guaranteed that they are taking business away from you.
Some people think that SEO is slowly dying and becoming an irrelevant marketing technique, but this is false. SEO is directly connected to many major successful websites and would not be the booming industry that it is, if it were a dying factor. Once your website has a successful SEO strategy in place, you will not only see the benefits, but come to realise how paramount SEO is to your company’s growth. SEO is here to stay and will continue to evolve with search engines as they change their algorithms.
Having an SEO strategy is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. If you want your website to be visible to the online community, you MUST employ SEO on your website.