Nearly 70% of American consumers say that the loading speed of a business web page determines their willingness to buy. Further, 22% of these consumers will close a non-responsive tab, while 15% will move to a competitor’s site. With such statistics, business owners must start paying attention to SEO as a matter of priority.
Today, more companies realize the importance of website traffic. With close to 50% of the global population now online, it takes a well-designed website to harness the power of online business.
This is why SEO marketing is essential to every business.
But what is SEO marketing? It’s a complex set of strategies that has many people asking what SEO marketing campaigns require and produce.
With more and more businesses depending on the “bricks and clicks” model, SEO marketing has become an integral part of doing business.
So, in this article, we answer the question, “what is SEO marketing?” We also reflect on the benefits of SEO marketing for your Springfield, MO, or Lake of the Ozarks business.
What Is SEO Marketing?
To understand SEO marketing, let’s start with the acronym. SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the process of improving the quality of a website’s performance in searches while also increasing the quantity of website traffic.
What distinguishes search engine optimization from other forms of marketing is that it focuses on unpaid traffic instead of paid or direct traffic from ads.
So, with that little glimpse of what SEO marketing is, we want to help you understand a little more of what goes into this process.
Quality
If your website’s quality is low, there’s a chance that you’ll perform poorly at attracting the right audience for your products and services. Most times, it’s this quality that determines the amount of traffic that converts into actual sales.
The quality we speak of isn’t just how your website looks. It also relates to the metadata in the coding of your site and several important on-page features that search engines evaluate, including the quality of user experience. These factors, among others, attract a higher quality of traffic to your site. Therefore, the first thing SEO helps you with is the improvement of traffic quality.
Quantity
Another critical component in SEO is the quantity of traffic. As your business grows, it can become challenging to manage the quantity of traffic it receives. While more traffic is better, poor management of such traffic can lead to a low conversion rate.
Optimizing your search engine results means ensuring that the content, images, and any other media meet the threshold for indexing. Every search engine has crawlers that gather information for a specific search and return the results within milliseconds. As you can see, to ensure that your website ranks high for a specific search, you will need to work on your search engine optimization strategy.
Reasons Your Business Needs SEO Marketing
If your business has yet to take advantage of search engine optimization, you are most likely missing out on a great deal of traffic and market share. Here’s why your business needs SEO marketing.
1. SEO Drives Traffic
In the aforementioned bricks and clicks model, search is the number one driver of traffic, beating even social media. Most online users ignore paid search returns like Google ads but instead focus on organic search results.
"Most online users ignore paid search returns like Google ads but instead focus on organic search results."
This is one of the big reasons why you can’t overlook SEO marketing and its ability to drive your online traffic. For example, in the recent pandemic, online sales spiked dramatically. As a result, businesses whose websites underperformed in searches lost out on a great deal of income. Now imagine a world where half of the population has access to the internet. Finding ways to harness high traffic can help you scale up sales.
In order to succeed in SEO marketing, keyword strategy is the first approach to consider. Search engine optimization helps you develop strong keywords that can attract targeted customers to your market niche. With SEO, you can focus the power of these keywords in your on-site optimization, which makes you a prime pick for the search engines.
Add to that some effective off-site optimization techniques and you can dramatically elevate your online business performance. Have you been looking for a strategy that can help you drive traffic to your website? Then, try SEO marketing, and you won’t regret it. All you need is a reliable digital marketing team by your side to help you drive traffic and achieve higher sales revenues.
2. SEO Ensures Better User Experience
Most business owners ask, “What is SEO marketing, and how can it improve my business?” Well, to begin with, SEO marketing accomplishes more than just driving traffic. This unique approach to marketing further helps improve your user’s experience.
The modern customer is highly conscious of what they want. If your website design fails to meet the requisite threshold of user experience, you may not convert customers as well as you would wish.
So you’ll need your website to achieve a customization level that ensures a smooth and enjoyable experience for your visitors. Think of your webpage as the equivalent of your physical reception and welcome area. The experience your visitors have when using your website defines their perception of your business.
Search engine optimization ensures that your customers interact with a friendly and easy to use website. Consequently, you want your website to be educative, engaging, and have that unique “wow” element.
Today, Google processes more than 5.6 billion searches in a day.
If your business website underperforms in the Google index test, then you stand to lose a great deal in returns from online traffic. One of the necessary elements to ensure that your webpage ranks high on Google indexing is to improve user experience. Our experts can help optimize your website in a way that will enhance the user experience.
One way to ensure a better user experience is to focus on content that adds value to your clients. We are always looking for opportunities to enhance the user experience by tailoring and updating content to add value while promoting your portfolio.
3. SEO Helps You Take Advantage of Growing Mobile Phone Usage
At least 81% of Americans own smartphones. Mobile searches have grown commensurate with smartphone ownership. This trend will continue to grow over the next few years as more people embrace the use of mobile phones. As mobile phone usage grows, the trend of more people searching for products on their phones before visiting physical stores will only grow.
Some businesses that own a website don’t realize this, and their homepages aren’t mobile-friendly. If a company’s images, text, and other media are inaccessible using a mobile phone, you will miss opportunities from this growing trend in mobile phone usage.
It is now imperative that you ensure that your products, goods, and services reach a broader audience by focusing on a mobile-friendly site. Most search engines are now paying more attention to how mobile-friendly a site is when indexing.
Page load speed is a big deal.
We can help you make your website’s loading speed faster to ensure a quick response for mobile users. Search engine optimization involves making your site’s button sizes large enough for mobile phone users. Many business websites lack that all-important feature of moderately sized fonts to help enhance access to your content.
Our work is to design, develop, and optimize your site to allow for ease of use by the growing millions of mobile phone owners. So, if your question was about SEO marketing and how it can help your business, hopefully now you know more. With us involved in your digital marketing in Springfield, MO, or at the Lake of the Ozarks, you’ll be able to better reach out to mobile phone users.
4. The Buying Experience Now Starts with a Search Online
In the past, foot-traffic was the ultimate win for any business. Even then, at least 50% of walk-ins were from window-shoppers. Today, this shift is moving more towards online window-shopping.
"Today, close to 93% of the online experience begins on a search engine."
This means that more potential buyers will now check out your merchandise online before proceeding to make a purchase. What happens if the first time impressions fail you? Today, close to 93% of the online experience begins on a search engine.
Businesses that have understood this reality are now keener on enhancing the overall customer experience. The modern client is hard to impress. This is more so given that they have multiple sources of information about the goods they want.
What you must focus on are the first impressions. The good thing is that search engine optimization helps solve this challenge for you. With a well-structured search engine optimization marketing strategy, you can capitalize on the fact that most searches for products now start online. Add to that some great images, descriptions, videos, customer reviews, some good calls to action, and you’re well on your way to capturing more sales.
5. SEO Helps You Capitalize on the Right Kind of Leads
“You don't want to end up reaching out to the wrong audience, which is akin to selling pork in Mecca.”
The internet has opened incredible new opportunities for businesses to grow and thrive. Even so, the amorphous nature of the online audience can limit your site’s ability to capture the right kind of leads. Determining the right target audience for your products and services is a seriously
