5 Reasons You Need a SEO Strategy

We all want more traffic coming to our website. In essence, that is the main reason you have a website in the first place: so more people can find you. When your goal is to bring visitors to your website, there are many tactics for driving traffic.

Social media can drive valuable traffic to your website and is generally free, it just takes time and effort. Pay per click advertising is also popular to drive traffic, especially when you are waiting for organic traffic to increase. Pay per click advertising can be extremely successful, but there’s one big issue. You need to constantly spend money. To make matters more difficult, if you stop paying for ads, your traffic can instantly come to a halt.

Enter, SEO.

If you run an online business or website, you’re probably familiar with the concept, or at least heard, of SEO. This is the holy grail for digital marketers. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of getting free organic traffic from search results within search engines. It is crucial for creating consistent traffic to your website.

Once you start ranking within search engines, the traffic will continue to flow, unlike with paid advertising.

What are Some of the Benefits of SEO?

SEO is very much an essential part of any effective marketing strategy. If you aren’t already optimizing for search engines, you are missing out on a massive amount of free traffic. To further illustrate the importance of SEO, here are a few reasons you should be thinking about SEO:

You Will Increase Traffic to Your Site

We touched on this earlier, but SEO will ultimately help bring more traffic to your website. If you’re not showing up on the first page of search engines, you are losing tons of traffic.

Research conducted by Hubspot shows that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search engines. This means that even if your epic piece of content is on the second page of Google, you may not be found. By optimizing for search engines, you greatly increase your chances of moving onto that first page and avoid missing out on the extra traffic.

Your Customers Will Find You

Maybe you already have a product that people are looking for. Maybe your service is something that someone always wanted, but never knew existed. How will these people find you? If your SEO is lacking, you may never be found.

Improving your SEO strategy can help build awareness around your brand, and in turn, drive more customers to your website.

Your ultimate goal should be to rank higher in the search engines so that you are easily found by people searching around in your industry. This can be extremely beneficial for your business because it gives you the chance to get in front of customers who might not have heard of you yet.

By having an effective SEO strategy, you increase the chances of being discovered. This can prove to be especially important for new businesses that have not yet established themselves in the space. Polishing your SEO strategy can allow you to bring more value to the right people.

SEO Can Boost Your Trust and Credibility

By showing up higher in the search results, you increase the opportunity for visitors to engage with your content and your brand. When SEO is done correctly, people online should be able to find your content based on the industry-related searches they are making.

Have you ever stumbled across a site that you found while searching online and became hooked? If the user likes your content, they may continue to revisit your website, interact with your brand on social media, and ultimately trust the information you are sharing. This, in turn, helps build credibility around your brand. The more search terms you rank for and the higher you rank in search engines means more opportunity to build your website and brand as a credible source of information in the industry.

SEO Improves User Experience

The entire reason SEO exists is that search engines, like Google, want to provide its users with the most relevant information and the best user experience. Therefore, Google analyzes many different aspects of a website to help determine what is most relevant and user-friendly. A few of things that these search engines look for are:

• Header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc)
• Alt-text on images
• Meta tags
• Site speed
• Content relevant to the terms being searched
• Quality of the content

The examples listed above are all “low-hanging fruit” in terms of improving SEO. This means you should do an audit of your site and make sure that you are properly utilizing them. If you aren’t, making these minor adjustments to your website pages can have a major impact on your site’s SEO and search volume.

SEO is Effective Long-Term

Improving your on page SEO and showing up in search engines will take time. By no means will you see immediate results from the work you put in. However, when results do start coming in, you will see how the benefits can have a lasting effect on your website.

If you’re running ads to drive traffic to your site, you know that once you stop running those ads, the traffic goes with it. With SEO, once you start ranking, traffic can continue to flow to your site. By continually improving your SEO strategy, you can help ensure that you don’t lose your current rankings over time while improving and growing new ones.

The Wrap Up – Getting Started with SEO

As you can see, there’s a lot of benefits to creating an effective SEO strategy. It is important to say organized and create a process you can stick to. Like with anything else, consistency is key. There are several apps and software out there, like Trello, that can help make that organization and process easier for you, especially when working in teams.

It is important to remember that the results are not instant. This can be discouraging at first, but if you stay consistent and diligent, you will see your site showing up more in search engines and in-turn bring more traffic to your website.

Clutch Creative is a full-service web development and digital marketing agency based in Burlington, VT. We offer digital marketing and SEO solutions for clients of all needs and sizes throughout Vermont and across the country. Contact us and see how we can help you focus your digital strategy and grow your business online.