If you’re beginning to explore online marketing, you'll soon see the three letter acronym: SEO. Short for search engine optimization.

The definition of SEO from Moz.com is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

We’ll help explain SEO in simple terms.

When Moz refers to traffic, they mean people are searching for things on Google.com **. By practising SEO, your goal is to reach more people via Google search results. The organic search engine results are the pages that Google shows you after you carry out a keyword search.

** There are other search engines besides Google, like Bing and Yahoo, but Google is dominant.

So why is SEO so important? We could talk for days about the importance of SEO. That would be overwhelming (and boring) here are ten reasons to show you why SEO is so important.

1. SEO Helps With Branding & Building Your Trust

Branding is vital for today. If a potential customer sees your website once, then never again, said a customer isn’t going to think about you when they get to the buying process. However, if potential customers see your website in the search results regularly, they’ll start to recognise you as an authority. As a flow-on effect, they’ll trust you more and thus more likely buy from you.

2. SEO Helps You Understand Your Audience Demographics via Google Analytics

As you practice SEO and your organic traffic improves you’ll be able to see a variety of data in Google Analytics (you need to connect your website to your Google Analytics account). You can learn where your traffic comes from, their age, what search terms they use, and what their interests are and a whole lot more. These details may provide new insight into who your customer is. Perhaps you’ve been marketing to the wrong people.

3. SEO Helps You Vary Your Marketing Mix

You’re walking on fire if you’re relying on one marketing tactic. If you rely on one tactic and that "goes bust" overnight you cashflow will dry up soon after. SEO is an inbound marketing strategy that can grow over time provided your product doesn’t go out of date and solves a problem there will be buyers wanting your solution.

4. SEO Helps Google Understand What Your Website Is About

If you have a blog on your website, that’s great; humans can figure out what your writing. Google’s technology is smart, however, can do with a helping hand. By optimising your website for search engines, you help the Google bots understand the meaning of your content. They’ll then be able to show your web page in the relevant search results in front of a buying audience.

5. SEO Turns The Spotlight On Your Sales Rockstars

If you have the best sales funnel and sales staff in history, congratulations to you! But there are no paying customers if there’s no interested audience.

Performing SEO can bring an audience interested in your products straight to you. Once you have that lead, you can let that sales funnel/staff take over and close them as customers.

6. Your Competition Is Performing SEO

The customer process is complicated. If you have a well performing offline marketing campaign for a product, the customer might not be in the position to buy just yet. However, what happens if they decide to buy in a couple of weeks and search on the internet for the product they saw. They may not remember your brand and will click on the first search result. This search engine result won’t be your page unless you’re performing SEO. You are helping your competitors out by making people are aware of the products they sell.

7. SEO Helps To Make Sure Your Content Gets Seen

If you have a blog, the promotional part is as important as publishing the content. By performing SEO, you are helping your promotion efforts in the long run. Articles don’t rank in the top spots overnight. If you’re consistent with SEO, you give yourself a chance to reach the top three spots in Google (the top three rankings are where the clicks are).

8. SEO Can Make Your Website Experience Better

We all have a short attention span. If a webpage doesn’t load within seconds, we jump to another website. If we can’t buy a product quickly, we give up. One aspect of SEO is about improving the user experience on a website. By implementing good SEO practices, you cut distractions allowing people to interact with your site as intended.

9. SEO Can Bring In An Ongoing Stream Of Customers

Once you’ve got SEO practising up and running, you can’t stop. But the ongoing tasks are often more about following a method and being consistent. You may make tweaks to your strategy over time based on results, but there won’t be too much of a change day to day. Once your posts start ranking for terms getting consistent search traffic, it’s time to give them their best experience.

10. SEO Is Never Saturated, You Can Still Capitalise On Opportunities

Some industries that are tougher to get traffic from SEO that has been exploited by marketers. SEO is always evolving, and there will be opportunities to get in front of customers. For some search terms, you’ll see videos from YouTube listed on the first page of the results. You can make a better video on the same topic and get your video on the first page. And with the likes of Amazon Echo products creating, there’s a belief that voice search optimization is the next hot opportunity by some.

Now that you’ve read this piece you know what SEO is. You know exactly how vital SEO is you can start taking SEO seriously. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything still, take a read of our blog, and you’ll find you start to pick up what everything means over time.

Filed in // Search Engine Optimization, Content Development, Website Optimization