How SEO Will Have a Profound Impact on Your Business for Years to Come

Nearly all market already know the reality about corporate budgeting: the promotion budget is always the first to get reduced. No one dislikes this any more than you do. However, as consumers begin to spend more time online, reducing the digital marketing budget isn’t a good idea.

Regardless of the online marketing strategies, you have implemented or you plan to, none of them will ever be complicated and multifaceted as the search engine optimization strategy. PPC (pay-per-click) might promise instant traffic to your website and quick conversions. Social media is an excellent way of keeping your audience engaged. However, SEO lays the right foundation for an exceptional online presence.

Whether you know what is SEO or not, you need a solid SEO strategy in place to succeed in online marketing. As such, this marketing strategy is worth the investment. Here is why.

SEO is going to be around for a very long time

As long as search engines are alive, so too will SEO, regardless of how many times Google modifies its algorithm. A Post published on Moz makes it clear that SEO will never die as long as different sites continue to compete for placement in the search engine results and the skilled and knowledgeable website owners enjoy the benefits of getting their sites rank better. Every site owner or digital marketer wants to enjoy the benefits of high search engine rankings (traffic and visibility). As long as sites are ranked based on certain ranking factors, SEO analysis and SEO techniques will remain relevant.

It brings tangible results

There are many pages of SERPs that clearly demonstrate how much competition you are likely to face in getting your business website rank on the first results page. A study conducted by the Chitika, an online advertising network, about 95% of organic traffic is lost by the time you check page two results in SERPs. That implies that the top page offers the most visibility, and that means more users are likely to click through to your site and drive traffic.

Local SEO Helps Small Businesses Compete in Search

When you look at SEO as a whole, it’s a very competitive space to be in. For example, just look at the fact that there are now more than a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today — all of which are creating new website content daily. This means it’s getting harder and harder to increase ranking for not just generic and competitive search terms, but pretty much everything.

One area where SEO is still a small business’ friend is through local organic search rankings. A perfect example of this can be seen with any smaller contractor, service, or localized mom and pop businesses.

For example, imagine if you had a local gaming or comic book story and wanted to reach audiences interested in MMO and online gaming. This is all possible through the use of localized advertising and content creation.

By using state, city, and zip codes within your content creation and link building efforts, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to get a higher Google ranking, while also reaching your targeted traffic and target market in the process.

Add some remarketing into the process, and you might just see a massive increase in ROI and web traffic in no time.

It is a cost-effective marketing strategy

Though the initial cost of SEO services might be high, and probably you might get a negative ROI for the first month or two, over time, the benefits of search engine optimization will outweigh the costs. A report released by SEMPO revealed that 11 percent of marketing cash is spent on SEO and about 87 percent is spent on PPC. Understanding that SEO efforts are associated with lower CPA (cost per acquisition), as you no longer need to pay for cost acquisition, it makes sense to invest in search engine marketing.

This doesn’t mean that you should flush your PPC marketing campaign down the toilet. Both PPC and SEO are complementary marketing strategies. SEO happens to be the most cost-effective channel you can invest in, particularly if you are looking to see results that last.

The overall number of searches is growing fast

On average, internet users in the United States conduct more than 12 billion searches monthly, according to a report from Comscore. Well, combine that number with the outstanding fact that the first five sear results on the first search page account for about 67.6 percent of all clicks (according to Moz). You will begin realizing how everything adds up, and don’t forget that these numbers are likely to continue growing. Without SEO, your customers will never find you online. Actually, you will be driving them to the doorsteps of your competitors.

…and your competition is catching up

Well, you can spend thousands or millions of dollars on email marketing and paid adverts. However, in the end, if you are not taking the right initiative to enhance your search position, you are at risk of falling miles behind your competitors. Search engine optimization is like a treadmill: the moment you stop running, you simply get flung off. That means if you stop optimizing your website for search engines, your competitors will always pursue their optimization goals and surpass you.

Wrap up

If you intend to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with SEO, first you need to understand everything that’s going on. Learn the basics of SEO and how it is likely to impact your business.