If you’re a business owner, you must know how SEO can help your business. To do that, you should first understand what SEO is. So, what is it? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, helps your website rank high in search engines (like Google) when people search for phrases or words that are related to your business.
Nowadays, when your site ranks high or is on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), people are more likely to click and visit your page. If more people are visiting your website, then you get more exposure and get more potential customers. That’s why making use of SEO strategies for your business is more essential than ever in this digital age.
If you are still new to the concept of SEO, you need to take some time to understand some of its technicalities. However, as an entrepreneur, it’s important to first understand how an SEO strategy can benefit your business website. So, here is a list of the topmost reasons why is that so.
Helps Establish Your Brand
One of the vital factors that can grow your business is brand awareness. This means that people should be able to recognize your brand, even if they aren’t exactly customers yet. Raising brand awareness does not automatically convert to increased profits, but this is beneficial to your business in the long run.
People need to know about your brand’s existence before they would even consider buying from it. They may not purchase from you right away, but with brand recognition, they will remember you when they are ready to buy your products. SEO helps establish your brand because you let people easily find you through Google searches. Assuming you use the right keywords, a user can easily find your bakery if he or she types “bakeries near me” on a search engine.
Helps Establish Your Authority in the Industry
Being in business is not just all about making profits, it’s also about creating meaningful relationships with your customers too. That means your business should change people’s lives and reflects good values as well.
A good customer relationship is built on trust. To build trust with customers, you have to establish your authority and credibility in the industry. There are many ways to achieve that, but one of those is by creating engaging content that people can search and refer to online.
Building high-quality content online would be useless if you don’t know how to make use of certain SEO strategies. You need to optimize your content if you want people or potential customers to find you online whenever they are looking for a topic or business that relates to you. Below are several SEO techniques that can help establish your authority in the business:
- Building Links – As you probably already know, a link is like an address to a certain page or website on the Internet. Search engines, like Google, assumes that if your website has a significant number of backlinks (links from other websites that link back to yours), then it recognizes that your site is indeed relevant, credible, and trustworthy. Aside from that, link building helps you gain more exposure and credibility because it can also be done through blogs, Social Media, and other types of content.
- Optimize Content: When making your content, you should ensure that it is optimized with the right keywords that can help achieve higher rankings on SERPs. A good rule of thumb is to use keywords that are relevant to your business and are most likely going to be used by your potential customers when they want to look for a product or service that you are offering.
You may also get help from tools like a keyword checker. Through that, you can observe which keywords are being used by competitors and potential customers alike. For example, let’s use the example of “bakeries near me” again. That phrase may be used in your content, but you can also opt to be more specific and use keywords like “Bakeries in Bay Area” if you want your content to be highly-targeted.
- Optimize Page Titles – This is similar to the previous one as page titles and headers are generally part of your content. However, it is important to emphasize this one because it means that your keywords should also be found on your page titles. That includes the meta titles and descriptions as well.
Page titles, meta titles, and meta descriptions are important because this is what people can read from the SERPs when they browse through the results of a certain keyword. It’s the excerpt of the website that you can see from the list of search results.
Helps Increase Your Conversion Rate
As mentioned, SEO can drive more traffic to your site and this increased exposure leads to higher conversion rates. To ensure that you can maximize conversions from site traffic, you have to combine SEO with CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategies as well. While SEO drives traffic to your site, CRO focuses on strategies to get higher conversions from your traffic. SEO and CRO can work together to boost your business by doing the following:
- Dynamic Content: Again, content is key. But instead of focusing mainly on general information, you must learn how to create personalized content. This is where CRO comes in. For instance, if the visitor is from England during a holiday, your page should have a greeting based on their holiday or have special discounts for the occasion. Customers are more likely to engage and buy from your site if they feel like your business is personally speaking to them.
- Visual Elements: Yes, content is key, but if your page is just full of words and blocks of paragraphs with no visuals to enhance the article, your visitors would get bored pretty quickly. You can avoid this by using compelling infographics, photos, and short video presentations that are relevant to your content. This way, customers will more likely engage and even revisit your website.
Conclusion
If you want your business to grow online, using SEO strategies is a must. Competition is very stiff in eCommerce. Not to mention, many people can easily get distracted by random stuff on the Internet. Hence, it is very difficult to compete for time, attention, and sales when you do business online.
With SEO, however, it makes it easy for your business to find its way to the people you are targeting. It’s a way of promoting your business without paying for ads on Social Media and other platforms. Plus, you get to build more meaningful customer relationships through your content as well! Using the right keywords and strategy, SEO can help your business rank higher on SERPs and help you get more traffic—and eventually sales—for your online business website.
