Any Business investment requires positive ROI and SEO is no exception!

According to Forbes,the SEO industry is approaching almost to $80 Billion and the trend is only going to be upwards.

With such potential, many people think that SEO is that silver bullet and the secret sauce that can make their business profitable instantly providing an insane amount of web traffic to their website.

So let’s start!

Can SEO Really bring value to your business?

Google processes  3.5 billion searches per day. In fact, searching anything on the internet is synonymous to Google these days. So if you can put your business website to the top three positions or at least to the 1st page of Google for your niche keywords then surely you can get some serious business. But the thing is it is now a lot harder these days.

How soon can I expect to see a return on investment when starting off with SEO?

Many people think that SEO can bring immediate results. But it is nothing like that.SEO needs time and patience to pick up. It also depends on the industry, the keywords you are targeting and also on your competitors. If you are targeting a highly competitive keyword then chances are you will never rank for that keyword or it needs a lot of time to outrank your competitor. But if you are targeting a less competitive keyword then you can rank in a much shorter time.

But with my 8 years of experience in SEO, I can tell you it needs a minimum of 3 to 5 months to get starting results from SEO in on average. So if you need some instant result SEO is not for you.

SEO v/s PPC which is better?

SEO is a long-term game which can deliver you results constantly. But if you need instant traffic and visibility PPC(Pay Per Click) should be your choice. But again it depends. You need to have a considerable amount of marketing budget to invest in PPC. But in fact, you need to mix both SEO and PPC together to get the best results.

SEO Facts

SEO is a one-time investment

There is a popular SEO fact that investing in SEO is only a one-time effort. Once you implement your SEO strategy it will remain viable forever. But this is absolutely a wrong thought!

According to SEL Google is changing their search algorithms each and every day. So it is almost mandatory to adapt to these changes. So you need to constantly tweak your website structure, content marketing, and outreach efforts. There are many tools like MozCast showing turbulence in the Google algorithm overtime each day. So SEO is never static and never will be!

Links are Everything

There is a popular SEO fact that only making tons of links is the main motive of SEO. It is not true today! In those old good days, links may be the only thing. But it is not anymore. Although backlinks(Backlinko) are the still the most important ranking factors today but that only works when those links come from authority websites. If you are making artificial links or still buying links then it can actually hurt you. So stop buying and selling links today!

SEO is beyond link building today. Factors like internal website structure, Site speed. Mobile usability and overall user experience are the key factors optimizing any website for SEO.

SEO is only about Google Ranking

Many business owners believe in the SEO fact that SEO is all about getting those top keyword rankings. But things are changing rapidly in terms of SEO.SEO is all about getting the intent right. Google is slowly turning into an answer machine providing direct answers than providing you the reference links.

So in terms of getting featured on those direct answers, you have to rethink your content strategy once again.

You have to structure your content into Q&A format and try to produce a direct answer of a question to get the full benefits of SEO.

So optimizing the content around these direct answer is a great SEO strategy.

Google’ recent support of  Structured Data For Question & Answer Pages  is a good example of this.

Voice/Audio has no impact on SEO

Voice and audio have been overshadowed hugely by the other SEO factors in the last few years. But audio and voice are now becoming the latest trend in SEO.

Specifically, with the advent of smart voice assistants, Google is pressing hard on voice SEO.

Google Assistant is testing Audio News recently for the purpose.

So optimizing your news website around these voice results can be a big game changer in terms of future SEO.

Social media will dominate

Social media is believed can influence Google search ranking. It is absolutely the case. In the near future, the influence of social media will only rise. More tweets, YouTube video will come up directly in the search results instead of the web links. Because Google is always looking a way to present their users with the most relevant results.

So videos and social media posts can be vital in near future.

Images are not that important

Many SEO’s still believe that Google does not stress much on images. But images are as important as content these days. Images can bring you a significant amount of traffic if you can optimize it in a better way. The first three things are to choose the image size, image type, sitemaps.

Choosing JPEGs or PNGs is the best choice for your image SEO as these two formats offer you the best quality in the smallest size. As small sized images will load more quickly it will also improve your site loading speed!

After optimizing the images it is also recommended to use a separate images sitemap to include all these images for your website. It will help Google to discover your images easier.

Also using the proper ALT text is a good practice to be able to increase the SEO visibility of your targeted keywords.

For decorative images, it is better to make them PNG-8 or GIFs to make it SEO friendly.

The use of CDN is also recommended to load the images fast!

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