When it comes to online marketing, there are two main avenues you can go down – SEO and PPC. Both have their benefits and are highly effective means of elevating your online business. But just how valuable is SEO to an online business? It’s a complex question but one worth answering. In short, the answer is very, much so, according to Darren from Smoking Chili Media, an SEO Bromley agency.
What is a Search Engine’s Primary Function?
The first thing is to remind ourselves what the aim is for every search engine. Their goal is to provide as close a match/solution to your query as possible. In other words, the ‘dream’ – for want of a better word – of a search engine is to automatically provide you with the information you’re after in a straightforward result. They don’t want you to scroll or check several results. This has become incredibly prominent recently with Google’s creation of featured snippet information. That box contains information pertinent to your query that you sometimes see above all the search results. Now that we’ve established the search engine’s overriding purpose, let’s look at how SEO plays into that.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (more commonly known as SEO) is the process by which a website is improved (both technically and in terms of its content) so that it ranks more highly on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) of major search engines – predominantly Google. Browsers decide where websites rank based on a website’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness. They use ‘spiders’ to ‘crawl’ a website according to specific algorithms.
The better those spiders (or ‘crawlbots’) can crawl a website, and the more its content falls under the algorithm’s requirements, the better a website will rank on the browser’s SERPs. So you can already see how valuable SEO is to an online business because better SEO means greater visibility for a company – and greater visibility for a company? Well, that’s when you begin to translate into sales and conversions.
How Does SEO Differ From PPC?
When you utilise an Adwords agency to carry out some PPC advertising/marketing for you, you’re using a form of paid marketing. SEO, on the other hand, revolves around the generation of organic web traffic. PPC can offer you quick wins; the more money you channel into it, the more successful you can be. SEO, by contrast, should be used more with a view towards the longer-term progression of a business. But whilst it might take longer to generate a tangible ROI, what’s not in question is that it will.
Just Why Do I Need SEO?
If you’ve ever looked online for a service, product, or piece of information, ask yourself how many of those times you have ended up looking past the first page on the results page. The chances are – not very many. All businesses – and not just online businesses – need to understand the importance of SEO. Otherwise, they’ll find themselves sitting in the depths of a web browser’s rankings, with virtually no chance of being seen by potential customers.
That’s clearly a tangible benefit – the increased website traffic – but there’s also an intangible benefit to using SEO services: reputation. To rank within the top three (preferably first) for a search query displays an unquestionable trustworthiness. The higher you appear on a browser’s SERP, the more likely people are to trust you from the off. Conversely, the lower you rank on a SERP, the more you will have to do to earn a visitor’s trust.
Some Surprising SEO Statistics
If you’re the sort of person who likes stats and facts, then read on for some SEO statistics that’ll show you just how valuable SEO is to an online business. Looking first, then, at just how giant the online arena now is, we see that in 2023, there have already been over 350 billion searches. SEO can offer conversion rates of almost 15% in terms of lead conversion. Although that might seem relatively low initially, that’s around eight times greater than the lead conversion of traditional marketing methods.
Organic Vs Technical SEO
SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, and the individual areas have complexities, quirks, and nuances. Organic SEO processes refer to a website’s content, including its articles and blog posts and the copy on each page. Technical SEO processes revolve around running a website as smoothly as possible and configuring the site SEO-friendly way. Organic SEO processes include:
- Keyword optimisation.
- Optimising meta titles and descriptions.
- Adding alt text to images.
Technical SEO processes include:
- Removing ‘dead’ or ‘broken’ links.
- Improving internal linking structure.
- Conducting regular technical site audits.
SEO is Complex, Changeable and Often Confusing
SEO is incredibly valuable to an online business, but you must implement the right processes and methods. SEO isn’t just a quick-fix sort of discipline – far from it. It requires well-thought-out, concerted and continuous work, especially given that the algorithms that determine SEO value undergo changes every day – with at least one major update (also known as a core update) occurring once every three months or so. Alongside those core updates, it’s thought that there are somewhere between 500 and 600 minor algorithm changes every year, and it takes seasoned SEO professionals to keep on top of that kind of flux.
The point is that just because you understand the importance of SEO for your business, that doesn’t mean you should jump in gung-ho without thinking. In fact, that can do more harm than good; what you knew to be a good SEO practice from your quick spell of online research might actually be an outdated practice that is now marked down.
