If you’re still on the fence regarding search engine optimization for your business or personal website, here are the top 21 Reasons why you need SEO.
Reason #1: Make your brand more visible
Nobody’s going to care about what you have to offer if they can’t find you on the internet. Worse yet, even if you have a purely local business, your potential customers routinely use the internet to research their local buying decisions. It doesn’t matter if you build a solid brand locally. If it doesn’t get in front of the right eyeballs, you’re not going to get buyers.
Reason #2: Control your brand’s messaging
Believe it or not, people are already talking about their experience with your business or blog. Just because you’re not aware of this doesn’t mean that you should ignore it.
When it comes to maximizing your brand’s appeal, and effectiveness, you need to get ahead of how people perceive it. You have to be proactive in shaping how people react or engage with your brand.
It’s hard to do that if your website isn’t optimized for top Google rankings. The way you talk about your brand, and how you position it has a direct impact on how people perceive your brand.
Reason #3: Build an evolving brand based on your traffic
A lot of businesses think that they already know what their brand should be. Sadly, this is theoretical.
You can come up with all sorts of ideas about how people should engage with your brand. But you’re just wasting your time.
You have to focus on how people actually interact with your brand and your content. Pay close attention to how they behave on your site and which pieces of content they read.
Using this information, you can craft a more realistic brand strategy that will enable your website to make more money. You evolve your brand around your customers not the other way around.
Reason #4: Shaped your customer’s sales journey
For anybody to buy anything from you whether online or offline, they must first trust you. This is a problem. Because for people to trust you, they must first like you. For them to like you, they must first know you.
Do you see how this how problematic this could be? I’ve just described the sales journey.
SEO enables you to rank different types of pages on Google. If you get top ranking for the right sequence of pages, you can shape or even control your customer’s sales journey.
Your brand is in front of their eyeballs when they’re looking up a solution to a problem. You come up again when they’re looking to choose among different solutions to their problem.
SEO also enables you to position your specific solution against your competitors. In fact, you can rank enough pages that build trust in your product or service that your visitors can then click a link to buy from you.
That’s how powerful SEO can be because you can shape, control, and direct your customer’s sales journey. Best of all, they’re usually not aware of this, they just see top results on Google.
Reason #5: Influence your customer’s decision-making
When customers make a decision, it usually comes at the tail end of their sales journey. They must first research their problem and know about potential types of solutions.
Researching further, they compare one type of solution against others. Once they like a specific way to address their issues, they then look for service providers or specific products.
This whole process builds trust, but it also takes quite a bit of time. Your customers know this, this is why they are very suggestible.
When you get the right pages in front of the right eyeballs during their sales journey, you are given a tremendous opportunity to influence how they size up different alternative solutions to their problem. You can make your product category look more desirable than alternative categories.
From that point on, you can then start building trust with your customer based on how you position the product you are pushing. This influence scales up with every page your prospective customer clicks through on your site. It also grows over time once you have them on your mailing list and they read your updates.
Reason #6: Increase sales through trust-building
As I mentioned earlier, people won’t buy from you unless they trust you. When enough of your pages rank well on Google, you’re more likely to build trust with your visitors.
Regardless of where they are in their sales journey, they can find your content. And if you craft the right pieces of content, each article, your customer comes across, will help build trust in your brand.
Maybe they just got started in their sales journey, and are just looking for basic information. You can start building credibility at that point.
On the other hand, if they’ve already known about the different options out there and are looking at your particular product, you can build trust at this stage as well. In fact, your job is much easier at this point. Whatever the case may be, you have a lot of opportunities to build trust based on simple repetition.
In advertising, there is such a thing as a rule of eight. Your audience has to see your brand or content at least eight times before they take action on it.
The same goes for ranking well on search engines. Thanks to SEO, it helps your content build familiarity with your prospective customers.
Reason #7: Poach your competitor’s keywords
It doesn’t matter what kind of niche you’re in. It doesn’t matter how esoteric or obscure your industry is.
Chances are there’s going to be a competitor who has already beaten you to it. They already have a website. It’s already getting traffic from Google and they already have a user base.
Don’t get sad. This is great news. Why? They did all the preliminary research for you. They figured out what works and what doesn’t work. They’ve gone through the trial and error phase of building up a site and getting traffic from Google.
This is where you come in. You can enter their domains into paid SEO tools like Semrush to get their organic keywords. You can then filter these based on difficulty and monthly search volume.
At the end of the process, you have a list of tried and proven competitor keywords that you can rank for using with your own original content. If you follow the process above correctly, you can outrank your competitors with the very keywords that their existing content triggers. How awesome is that?
Reason #8: Build on your competitor’s strengths
By entering your competitor’s domains into paid SEO tools, you can quickly see what your competitors are doing right. Most paid SEO tools will reveal your competitor’s top pages.
Study these and pick them apart. Look for clues as to what they’re doing right so you can raid their strengths on your own site.
This way you can build on what your competitors are doing right. This can mean their content choices, their organization or site structure, or even their multimedia preferences, like the type of pictures and diagrams, and videos they have on their posts.
Reason #9: Fix your competitor’s weaknesses
Just as paid SEO tools can reveal what your competitors are doing right. They can also list out areas for improvement.
By simply deciding to fix your competitor’s mistakes or weaknesses, you gain a competitive advantage. They’ve run into a wall when it comes to certain site issues.
Knowing this, you can make sure that your site doesn’t suffer from these weaknesses and end up overtaking your competitors for certain keywords on Google.
Reason #10: Get passive traffic
The great thing about search engine optimization is that it is front-loaded. This means you put in a lot of work getting your site set up correctly, and linking to it the right way. But once you’ve finished setting up your site and completing its content, you can lean back and take it easy.
Let Google work behind the scenes, the process, or whatever you’ve published online and start sending you traffic in the coming months. In short, for every new visitor you get, you don’t have to put in work.
Compare this with paid social media ads. The moment you stop paying is the moment your traffic from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms and the traffic you get from search engines is completely passive.
You don’t have to put in any new work. Of course, you still have to invest some of your time, effort, and focus from time to time to maintain your site’s SEO. But you’re not going to put in the same level of work when you were building your site.
Reason #11: Get long-term traffic
Another great feature of search engine traffic is that it scales up with time. As more of your pages are indexed and continue to rank higher on Google, the more traffic you get.
Think of your website as a tree that you planted at first, there’s not much to look at. But as the tree grows, it becomes bigger and bigger. If you’ve set up your website correctly, you’ll stand to get a whole lot of traffic in the future because you’ve set up the website the right way.
It all boils down to targeting the right keywords and producing great content based on those keywords. This is how you laid the foundation for sustainable and consistent traffic that scales up over time.
You can build other websites as your traffic continues to organically grow, or you can continue to invest in your site to ensure that you get even more traffic in the future. You do this by investing in new content.
Reason #12: Talk to your customers when they are most interested
Keep in mind that search engine traffic only takes place when people enter your target keywords into Google. In short, your content gets in front of their eyeballs precisely at the time that they are most interested in the information your content has.
This is powerful traffic. Talk about high interest or “hot traffic”. This intensity of interest can translate to more sales, assuming the person entering keywords that pull up your pages, intends to buy something.
The good news is different keywords communicate different intents. If your site ranks well for commercial intent keywords, chances are you’re going to convert some of the people that entered those keywords into Google to pull up your pages.
Reason #13: Search Traffic costs less
Since the work involved in search engine optimization is front-loaded, you pay all your costs upfront. This means that as you get more traffic from Google over the following months, the amount of money you paid for each additional visitor goes down over time.
No wonder SEO has a higher ROI than social media marketing. But in social media marketing, you have to pay per click or per campaign. And your ROI fluctuates dramatically, depending on many different factors.
Not so with search traffic. If you’re targeting the right websites, and you have optimized your pages correctly, Google will send you traffic in the future. It tends to scale up over time, depending on how well optimized your site is. This has the effect of reducing your overall per visitor costs.
At first, your website is not going to get much traffic from Google. After all, it’s a brand new WordPress installation. You just put up your content.
But as Google starts to rank, the overall authority of your site starts to increase. Search Engine Optimization helps ensure that your site authority increases over time.
By targeting easier to rank keywords with superior content, you start to rank for these search queries. The more of these easy keywords you rank for, the higher your site authority gets. And the higher your authority, the easier it will be for your other content to rank.
This process is an upward spiral, and it all begins with ranking lower difficulty keyword content.
If you manage to do that, then you start riding the upward spiral of increased site authority, leading to higher rankings leading to even more site authority.
Reason #15: You can control your keyword rankings through interlinking
A lot of online publishers and business owners think that SEO is just all about finding the right keywords and building content around them. While that’s a big part of the process, the way you choose to link your content with each other can also boost your rankings.
You must put a lot of time and think into this process. You have to be strategic in choosing which page to link with which page.
This highlights the fact that Search Engine Optimization helps you increase your keyword rankings through interlinking. This is a conscious decision.
You’re not at the mercy of Google because you can always choose to interlink your pages in another way. This gives you control over how quickly your content will rank on Google.
Reason #16: SEO gives you more control over conversion sales material
The typical website consists of informative, transactional, and commercial pages. Commercial pages help you convert traffic into cash.
Since SEO helps you control the ranking of your conversion pages by extension, you have more control over the sales content contained in those pages. Since you control your content, you can tweak it in real-time. You can make small changes which you can then cross-reference with just how many sales you’re racking up. You can do this with the same degree of precision with social media ads.
Reason #17: SEO gives you a higher chance of deep user engagement
You’re in control of how you interlink your content together. This is a lot of power. Because if you get your visitors excited about your internal pages through strategic internal linking, they tend to stay longer on your pages.
Why is this a big deal? Google’s rank brain algorithm factors in user experience when ranking your pages.
If it notices that most of the people who click on your link on Google search results stay on your site instead of hitting the back button, Google views this as a sign of page quality. If your website does this consistently, Google will increase your rankings.
Thankfully, with SEO, you have a higher chance of deep user engagement because you can control how you interlink your pages. You can use calls to action. You can make sure that each succeeding page builds on the content found on the previous page.
Reason #18: SEO helps you build a list for less
If you’ve done any kind of online marketing, you’ll probably come across the saying, “The money is in the list”. This saying is absolutely true.
You need to build a mailing list. The more people you have on your list, the better. Why? When you send out an update, and there’s a link in it that goes to your blog post, expect a nice big bump in traffic.
Given the fact that the vast majority of people who visit your site will never come back again, your mailing list acts as a ready source of traffic. Build it with search engine optimization.
When more of your pages rank on Google there are more potential eyeballs on your content, put a newsletter offer or an email list invitation in front of those eyeballs.
Convert as many of those eyeballs as possible. So your list can get bigger and bigger with time.
You can actually make more money with your website through a well-built email list. Every single update you send has a solicitation for your own product or an affiliate offer.
On the other hand, you can send updates telling them that you have a new blog post and when they click on a link and end up at your post, what do they see? That’s right, they see content with ads surrounding it.
There are just so many ways you can make money with your list and the best news is oftentimes, list members buy from you several times. You also get many chances at converting your list members. As long as they stay on your list, they can come back to your blog and see more ads. Eventually, they will click on an ad that can make you money.
SEO helps you build a list for less money than social media marketing. Remember, long-term search traffic is cheaper than paid traffic and social media sites.
Reason #19: You leverage Google’s credibility
When people notice that your pages are ranked number one on Google, subconsciously they make a connection. In the back of their minds, they’re assuming that since you are ranked at the top by Google this means that Google has somehow vetted the quality of your content.
This can then lead them to the conclusion that they can trust you. They’ll do they know that you were able to get those top rankings through search engine optimization. Still, search engine optimization, being number one gives you an aura of authority and instant credibility.
Reason #20: SEO fits hand in glove with all types of content marketing
It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing content marketing through video blogging, podcasting, or even Q&A marketing on platforms like Quora, or Facebook groups. SEO can help you.
When you do blogging, you need your posts to get found. If you are embedding your YouTube videos into your blog posts, you need the blog posts to be found.
SEO gives you a way to rank these pages. So your specific way of the content method of content marketing gets the eyeballs it needs.
Reason #21: You can repurpose your SEO content
A lot of businesses and online publishers believe that SEO is just restricted to publishing content online. This can take the form of blog posts or articles, but they automatically assume that the only way to do SEO is text.
The truth is, when you’re creating SEO text content, you can convert it into a different format. Once you’ve done the conversion, you can then distribute it on different platforms that specialize in that type of format.
For example, you can take a guest post and boil it down to a series of short questions and answers. Each of these will have a link to your posts.
You can post this one by one on Twitter. You can also post the longer answers on Quora with a link back to your page as the source. You can also boil down your articles into short video scripts that you can turn into a video and upload to your YouTube channel. You can also make a stripped-down version of that video and upload it to TikTok.
The bottom line is all the work, time, and focus you put into creating SEO content doesn’t have to go to waste. You can easily convert it into many different formats ranging from pictures, diagrams, slideshows, long videos, short videos, tweets, questions and answers, and many more.
The final word on why you need SEO
Pay close attention to the 21 reasons above. All of these give you a competitive advantage and enable you to build a solid online brand sooner rather than later.
Whether your main focus is on getting as much search engine traffic as possible, or you’re leaning more towards social media. You cannot afford to ignore SEO. It is a worthy investment that continues to scale in ROI over time.
Need help with your SEO content? Contact Gene Eugenio for expert SEO article and blog post creation assistance