The world of marketing and advertising has drastically changed in the past few decades. Rather than traditional forms of marketing being the priority, digital marketing and its various aspects are at the forefront. One of the most important aspects of digital marketing that your brand needs to master to grow is SEO. Some brands may shy away from SEO due to its perceived complexity, but it is critical that SEO is a focal point during digital marketing campaigns. So why exactly does your website need to be optimized for SEO, and what can it do for you?
Here’s why SEO is important for your website.
Visibility
One of the most important things that SEO can do for your website is to increase its visibility. When your website is optimized for SEO purposes, potential customers will have a much easier time finding you. SEO is designed to increase your search engine ranking for certain keywords and searches. Most consumers don’t look past the first few search results, so if you don’t rank near the top, you’ll receive little to no traffic from that particular search. When your SEO efforts come to fruition, you should be ranking higher for specific search engine results, resulting in more people seeing your website and a higher amount of web traffic.
Lead Generation
Another extremely important reason why you should optimize your web presence for SEO is the increased amount of leads it could generate. As mentioned before, most users don’t look past the first few results, meaning if you don’t rank highly, then you won’t get lots of web traffic. As your search engine ranking increases, so too will the amount of traffic your website receives. While this results in more visibility and brand recognition, it can also lead to an increased amount of leads being generated. With more traffic coming to your website, you’re bound to have more people meeting your conversion goals, even if you can’t quite entice all of your new visitors. That being said, the increased amount of leads can really be a key factor in your business’s growth and expansion.
Authority and Credibility
Another reason why you should engage in SEO practices is to build your website’s authority and credibility. By doing so, you can appeal to both search engine crawlers and human users. Consumers trust brands that have a high amount of authority and credibility. Users know that if they buy from a credible brand, there’s a much higher likelihood of being satisfied with the product. Since human users place such a high emphasis on authority and credibility, so too do search engine crawlers.
Search engine crawlers will typically rank websites with high authority and credibility over those that are lacking authority. Optimizing your website for SEO practices can be a great way to signal to both human users and search engine crawlers that your brand is credible, which will be a huge help in growing your business.
Optimized User Experience
An underrated aspect of SEO is that following the best SEO practices actually results in an optimized user experience. Many of the things you need to do for SEO and digital marketing not only cater to search engine crawlers, but they also make the user experience much better overall.
For example, creating an interface for mobile visitors to your website will not only improve your SEO, but will also be greatly appreciated by your mobile users. In addition, things like faster website load times and easy website navigation will also result in SEO optimization and a better user experience. Customers have an extremely short attention span, so if your website isn’t optimized for them, they will take their business elsewhere. Thankfully, optimizing for SEO simultaneously results in a better customer experience, allowing you to kill two birds with one stone. As a result, you should run a website SEO audit, seeing what you can fix about your website to improve the experience for your users and make it easier for crawlers to index your website.