Starting a new business requires a lot of work, especially when it comes to building that business to scale. It involves overseeing how your business operates, managing your financials and the promoting your brand, services or products in a way that will your target audience into paying customers.
As technology is integrated into almost everything now, these tasks have become much easier. Aside from marketing your brand with traditional methods like posters, leaflets, TV and radio ads, you have new opportunities that you can take advantage of when it comes to getting your company name out there in the world.
One of the most important things to do in your digital marketing campaign for your new business is to build a good website. Alongside other online methods like email marketing or social media marketing, having a website is a great foundation for a strong online presence. But having a website is not enough. You can’t wait for people to just stumble across your website when there is so much competition out there. You have to take measures to ensure people visit your site and pay for what you have to offer. This is where SEO comes into play.
But what is SEO and why is it essential to incorporate in your website? Can it really help your business grow? In this blog article, we discuss how SEO can have a positive impact on your business.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the measures put in place to allow your website to be found in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc. It's the ways you can grow your online presence organically and help your website obtain high ranking results in the search engines of your choice.
Great SEO also allows your website to stand out among a sea of competitors through the use of keywords and phrases related to your brand, industry, product or services. It is a technique considered to be an important tool to make your business become more visible on the world wide web.
To learn more about what SEO is before we go into the details of how it can help your business to grow, check out our other blogs covering the topic:
How can SEO help your business to grow?
Right, now let's break down the top 8 advantages that SEO has on business success and growth. There is a lot to uncover so please get comfy, with detail comes value after all.
1. Drives Traffic to Your Website
One of the first objectives in your promotional or marketing campaign for your new business is to improve visibility and build awareness. Since more than 3.5 billion people can now be found online , having a website is a crucial step in building your business’ visibility. SEO will help you achieve this goal and help drive traffic to your website. SEO ensures your website stands out and makes it easier for your target audience to find you. Your site’s awareness level grows, which helps people click through to you.
2. Promotes Trust in Your Brand
As your website ranks higher in search engines and become more visible on the internet, you increase your brand’s credibility. This should be one of your top goals in applying SEO to your strategies. However, it's important to note, this cannot be achieved overnight. This will require time and effort from your end. For tips on what you can do to build your brand's trust value and credibility, click HERE.
3. Makes Your Brand Valuable
When your target audience trust your brand, your credibility increases, making you more valuable. It's an essential part to making your business a success. So integrate SEO measure that allow you to build your brand value and as that builds, you'll gain more opportunities to acquire more customers. This leads nicely to the next point...
4. Increases Lead Generation
Like we mentioned earlier, more than 3.5 billion people are online and the majority of these people use Google to find the businesses, products and services they want. The searches these people carry out ensure they are keen to purchase there and then. If your website is optimised with the correct keywords and phrases, you will appear on their searches which makes you in the right place, at the right time... enabling you to catch their interest right away.
5. Helps Build Engagement and Raise Conversion Rate
If your website lands on the first page, or even better on the top spot, of search result, you’ll generate the best traffic. More people will click onto your website, and as these people visit the site, you can further increase your engagement which equals higher conversion rate.
We advise you have a chat box or a contact landing page for your customers to easily leave a message and give you a call. And don't forget to add your social media links on your website page so visitors can easily access them if they want to see more about your business and engage with you further. This is a brilliant way to start forming relationships with your target audience, who in turn convert into sales.
6. Supports Positive User-Experience
Your SEO measures also need to focus on making quality websites and promoting positive user-experiences (UX) for the people who have visited the site. The best way to assist in positive UX is making sure your website is easy to navigate and journey through. By doing this, you make your website easily available for search engines as it looks for quality in its website recommendations. If your site loads slowly, has a poor-looking interface and is not easily navigated, search engines won't boost it to the top.
To learn about what makes a great user experience, check out our blog on the subject. All you need to know can be found there.
7. It's Cost-Effective Especially For New Businesses
Generally marketing campaigns can be costly and often incur additional expenses. Optimising your SEO is one of the most cost-effective methods to building your business' brand. Through SEO, your brand will be in the right place at the right time when people are searching. You can do it all yourself. But for businesses with some money behind them, hiring an SEO agency or individual that is good with SEO can achieve great results and save you money in the near future. This makes your chances of a conversion relatively high - giving you return on your investment. Win, win!
8. Produces Long-lasting Results
Businesses, particularly young businesses, fail their SEO attempts because they lose patience while waiting for their intended results. Often or not, businesses abandon their efforts and move to a different campaign without giving it the chance to do what it needs to do, in the right period of time.
Again, SEO takes time and cannot be achieved overnight. Unlike other marketing strategies that you can see results almost instantly, SEO is a steady process. Once momentum has gained, your online presence and visibility can last months and years. Like anything, the more effort put into it, the better results you gain.
