Top 12 Benefits of SEO to Boost Business Growth
Are you thinking of getting started with SEO?
One of the biggest challenges for businesses today is to be found organically in SERPs (search engine result pages) and stay profitable. That’s when you need SEO.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of on-page, off-page, and technical optimization of your website to help search engines easily crawl, index, and understand your website content, so it can rank you better on SERPs for relevant searches.
The higher you rank in SERPs, the more people will see it.
Some of the critical SEO aspects that will help you rank higher in result pages are:
- Compelling, high-quality content relevant to search queries
- Keyword optimization to attract users
- Great UX through faster page loading, seamless navigation, ease of use, intuitive UI on any device
- Building backlinks through quality, share-worthy content
- Optimized URLs, descriptions, and Title to drive CTRs (click-through rates)
- Schema markup/rich snippets
In this post, we are going to dive into the Top 12 Important benefits of SEO for your business:
12 Benefits of SEO for Businesses in 2024:
Sales Funnel is filled with Quality Leads
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that takes time to implement and show results. But, if you are already ranking well in search engine result pages, a strategic SEO plan will help you attract quality leads in the long run. Potential leads will enter your sales funnel, which is likely to generate more revenue.
A long-term SEO plan involves several steps, some of which are:
- Creating new content for new keywords
- Identifying new opportunities to optimize already existing content
- Building a new backlink profile
- Conversion of mentions into backlinks
- Regular SEO health checkups to detect issues related to indexing or crawling
- Maintenance of existing backlinks
- Consistent Brand promotion on social media platforms
Organic Audience
On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second, which makes up to 3.5 billion search queries per day. To reap the benefits of such a large audience, you must invest in SEO. It will help you attract more traffic and leads and eventually boost conversions for your businesses in the long run.
As per SEJ’s Survey Poll results, nearly 49% of marketers report that ‘Organic Search’ is the marketing channel that drives the highest ROI. This means users are already searching for the products/services you offer, you just need to be found on the result pages.
Another benefit of SEO is, that it allows you to target audiences based on their location, preferences, purchase history, online behavior, and more.
Cost-effectiveness
Driving organic traffic through SEO is free, unlike PPC (pay-per-click) ads where you must pay every time a searcher clicks on your ad. PPC campaigns have higher CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) over a specific period as compared to SEO. A study reveals that companies that have invested in increasing SEO traffic rather than paid search have witnessed a 60% drop in their CAC.
SEO requires ongoing efforts that drive traffic and leads to your websites for relevant searches for a long period- sometimes even forever. Initial investment in the right SEO tools and SEO auditing will yield good results and benefits in the long run.
Improves UX
SEO improves User Experience (UX) due to faster page loading speed, intuitive performance, and on-page optimization.
Google suggests websites should have an LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) of 2.5 seconds. This is a Core Web Vital metric that indicates perceived load speed when the website’s main content has loaded. A faster LCP ensures the best UX. You can use PageSpeed Insights to detect performance issues on your website.
Besides, on-page SEO improves the readability and visuals of your website due to title tags, headers, internal linking, image alt text, URL structure optimization, meta descriptions, keywords, schema markup, rich snippets, etc. All of these on-page SEO factors lead to a pleasant user experience.
Brand Credibility and Trust
With a strong SEO strategy, your website will be fully functional, perform well, and rank higher in SERPs. Consistently seeing your website in top results will assure customers that you have the required expertise and information in your niche to cater to their requirements. Through such immersive experiences, you can build brand credibility and trust amongst users.
Tap into Local Audience
Leveraging local SEO and creating a Google Business Profile for free will help users find you on Google Maps and Google Search for relevant searches and become leads.
It’s a great way to tap into local audiences organically and capture all “near me” searches. Besides, it also helps you share your opening/closing times and business hours with your customers. You can even track the performance of your Google Business Profile with built-in analytics.
Streamlines Sales Journeys
A good SEO helps you rank better for informative or educational content, making it easier for users to find answers or solutions on your website. This further helps push leads down the sales funnel to make the final purchase.
Moreover, optimizing for high-intent, long-tail keywords allow you to directly target users looking for the exact product/service you offer. Hence, a strategic SEO plan efficiently streamlines sales journeys by bridging the gap between search intent and final purchase.
Better ROI
SEO provides quantifiable and trackable results, making it easier to calculate ROI. Businesses can track every single KPI of their SEO strategy including conversions, CTRs, traffic, rankings, etc. to analyze at a granular level, monitor engagement metrics, and keep track of user demographics as well.
Advanced SEO analytics helps you know which sales channel users use most to complete a purchase, which keywords are highly searched for, which keyword drives the most traffic, user behavior, and so on.
Increases Mobile-friendliness of your website
SEO not only promotes responsive UI but also optimizes multimedia and images on your website to aid faster page loading on any device.
Today, over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Adding to this, in 2021 Google shifted to mobile-first indexing, indicating that websites that do not load fast on all screen sizes will rank lower in organic search result pages. Users are likely to leave your website if it has a slow performance.
SEO promotes mobile-friendly URLs to ensure your web design adapts to all screen sizes seamlessly. By prioritizing mobile-friendliness, SEO helps your website be visible in SERPs.
Brand awareness
SEO helps businesses raise brand awareness to ensure potential customers know, identify, and come back to your brand due to trust and reliability. The more the audience recognizes your brand, the higher the engagement.
SEO increases your site visibility in search results, allowing you to showcase your products, services, and other relevant content to potential leads.
Competitive Edge
In this highly competitive digital landscape, SEO can significantly help you stay ahead of the competition with robust SEO strategies. This can be done through analyzing competitors’ SEO strategies, keyword research, creating compelling content, tracking key metrics of marketing campaigns, and more.
Supports PPC Campaigns
PPC (pay-per-click) Advertising is a great way to quickly gain visibility in search results by displaying ads on websites, search result pages, and other platforms. Now, PPC is a paid marketing strategy, whereas SEO is a free marketing strategy that continuously attracts organic traffic and leads.
PPC advertising together with SEO creates repeated exposure and boosts brand presence in the search engine result pages. Many users still trust Google and its algorithms and prefer clicking on organic searches rather than links with “Ad” or “Sponsored” labels.
SEO backs up your PPC efforts as your website ranks at the top for paid as well as organic results, highlighting your website even more to users. Further, you can use data and insights from SEO analytics to create targeted PPC campaigns.
Conclusion
Embracing SEO is a long-term, ongoing marketing strategy that is important for all businesses in this ever-evolving digital era, regardless of their business size. However, it requires patience, time, and expertise.
SEO will help you thrive and gain a competitive edge for a lower CAC (customer acquisition cost) as compared to other marketing strategies. To reap the maximum benefits of SEO, you need to invest in the right SEO tools or get help from the right SEO experts who can help you implement robust SEO tactics. It can range from on-page, to off-page as well as technical SEO aspects.
With all the benefits of SEO listed above, hope you understand how it helps businesses boost brand visibility, widen audience reach, and conduct targeted marketing. Implementing SEO is no doubt an intelligent step that is bound to drive long-term business growth and revenue.