Top 5 Benefits You Need To Know About SEO

In the last month, you’ve probably been approached by a company offering SEO services… Or you’ve looked into it. It seems like everybody is trying to sell SEO… Well, I’m here to make some clarifications on behalf of a confusing industry. Well, as promised, here are our top 5 benefits you need to know about SEO.

1. It’s cost EFFECTIVE

Actually, it depends how much time you have? SEO is useful for long term effectiveness. If you are short of time and your budget permits you, then you should consider combining SEO with Pay-Per-Click (PPC). PPC is fast and encourages immediate results, although you pay every time someone clicks on your search engine results. SEO is free for people to click on your result. SEO is not an advertisement, its an organic search result. There is an initial cost for Digital8 to create your SEO content and implement it, however it costs less to implement SEO than it does PPC (Ciss, 2012). 

2. SEO will help people FIND your website

I can hear you saying “doesn’t Google automatically rank my website once it is up and running” unfortunately not if you haven’t written original, relevant, engaging content. Implementing SEO means that as you optimise your website content for your customers, your website will be found more easily in Search Engine Results. This means increased traffic to your website, and that means more potential customers for you. SEO definitely has the ability to help people find your website, you just have to make sure you create content for people, not Search Engines (Srivastava, 2012). So far I’ve said that you need ORIGINAL, RELEVANT, and ENGAGING content. It’s important. Super important. Neon flashing lights, bolded text important. What I haven’t said though is that whilst you’ve probably got content, Google still doesn’t think that it’s good enough yet. But why? Simple. SEO will edit your content to ensure it is long enough, original enough, relevant enough, engaging enough. The rules change regularly, for example, a 500 word blog posts a week now isn’t good enough they are soon going to need to be at least 1000 words with awesome pictures and videos. They will also need to be interesting. Google will know if they aren’t, because your bounce rate tells them so. This is part of the evolving SEO domain. Can you identify the new content that you want on your website? or the types of articles that you want linking to your website? 

3. SEO can multiply your IMPACT

If you’re looking at using SEO, make sure you have some kind of marketing strategy in place to drive people online in the first place. By adding SEO into your Marketing mix it multiplies your impact by guiding users to your website. SEO gives your customers more information, more contact details, more content… more reasons why they should use your product or service, and not your competitors (WordStream, 2013).

4. Geographically TARGET customers

Most people search Google for services in a particular city, they don’t necessarily search company names. You need to start ranking for the things people are searching for, for example, if you’re an Immigration Lawyer in Brisbane, you’d want to rank for things like: Immigration Lawyer in Brisbane, Immigration services Brisbane, Family Visa Services Brisbane etc etc. You get my point. Google currently uses over 200 variables in its search algorithm to determine the organic search engine results (Google, 2013). Those get tweaked, added to, or removed every day (Google, 2013). Your SEO choice has to make sure that they stay up to date with those changes to ensure your website is always found by your customers.

5. Gain COMPETITIVE advantage 

There is no quick fix when it comes to any kind of marketing and SEO is no different. It takes a lot of hard work, ceaseless effort and time to see consistent results. You cannot trick Search Engines into ranking you higher than your competitor. You just have to have the best SEO expert on your side and keep working on it. Short term SEO tactics will only result in harsh penalties.

SEO is important. Seriously. Get on it, before your competitor down the street does.