Originally Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was all about ranking as high as you could in the top ten blue links on Google. These would appear after the really obvious Ads at the very top, remember those?
Now this is what Google results look like…….
It’s a whole different ball game. The competition, and also the opportunities, have increased significantly. You haven’t just got 10 organic spots to appear in, you have images/videos, snippets (people also asked section), maps etc.
But have you wondered why this is beneficial to your business? With all the competition out there, is it possible to succeed? Below, we have listed five reasons why we think SEO is beneficial and essential for ALL good Digital Marketing Strategies.
1. Measurable and cost effective ROI
All good Marketing Strategies require some sort of measurement in terms of its Return on Investment (ROI).
- 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search (Brightedge)
- Those searching are more likely to purchase e.g. 78% OF LOCAL MOBILE SEARCHES RESULT IN IN-STORE PURCHASES (Search Engine Land)
So it’s clear to see if you succeed at SEO, there will be far more prospects proactively searching for your products/services, landing on your website every day. All you have to do then is convert them into leads/sales and measure the ROI.
Thankfully, with pretty much all Digital Marketing, you are able to measure all the Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Here are the top level KPI’s we would look to provide to our clients:
- Rankings
- Search visibility
- Organic Traffic
- Referral Traffic (we will explain why further into this article)
- Conversions
Conversions is the most important KPI and for all websites even eCommerce, it’s important to give a value to each conversion (not just eCommerce sales) on the site. Whether it’s an email marketing subscription, contact form, online quote etc. Every business should learn what kind the rate of conversion is for every one of these goals on the site. Then once you know that, you calculate the average sale value. Then you can calculate the average value of each conversion on the site.
Example formula:
C Contact form is completed 100 times in a month
P 30 of those purchase
V The average purchase value is £1000
(P X V) / C = Value of contact form conversion
30 X £1000 = £30,000
£30,000/100 = £300
You can then add this to your Google Analytics or simply include in a KPI sheet, so that you multiply the number of contact forms completed from Organic traffic by the value calculated above.
You can then use this for all sources of traffic to your website. You should see over time, as your SEO performs better, the value will increase. However with Google Adwords, the value doesn’t increase so much, unless you increase your budget.
2. Improved UX and conversions on your website
Google is constantly developing its algorithm to understand whether the website they rank highly, are actually being appreciated by those users they send. They can monitor how long someone stays on your site. They understand the correlation between user-experience and the dwell time on your site. Therefore they are now monitoring websites and their UX.
You can find out the kinds of things they look out for, if you fancy reading through their Search Quality Valuator Guidelines?I don’t blame you if you don’t, it’s pretty lengthy, but here are a number of thing s they look out for:
Trust signals such as easy to find contact details, privacy terms, https etc.
Usability such as page loading time, pop ups etc.
If you tick all of the boxes Google rate as quality signals, not only will it improve your rankings but your website visitors will be more likely to convert.
3. Increased Traffic
The main benefit of having an SEO strategy in place is to get your website more traffic from the search engines. The further up you are on the page, the more likely you are to gain traffic.
On average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%.
(Source Backlinko)
We’ve talked about the impact of good SEO on your rankings, but what about the impact of links on referral traffic?
Why referral traffic?
Well if you are building inbound links to your site form quality relevant websites to improve your rankings, then you should see increased number of traffic coming from these referral sites you have generated links from.
We would also guess that Google will be looking to somehow monitor the click-throughs from referral links to understand whether these they should add to a sites trust score. After all, a genuine link for the users benefit should surely translate to clicks on that link.
How they do this is the question, nearly everyone has Google analytics on their site and these will measure clicks on certain links and where traffic is coming from. It’s whether or not Google are allowed to use this data.
4. Brand Awareness
It is an obvious bonus, that when you appear more often in the search results and have backlinks on other websites, your brand will be seen more often.
Link building done correctly will grow your brand and establish you as an authority in your market.
These are some typical link building techniques that will help:
Content creation, which can show people the expertise of your company, and this can go a long way toward building your brand. For example, if you create a piece of content based on industry data and publish it, you have a chance of becoming well known for it in your industry.
Outreach, when trying to get website publishers of social influencers to look at your content and possibly share it. If the content is great and really well targeted, the outreach will ensure your brand is not only seen by more people, but it’s perception improved.
The relationships built from good outreach and collaboration are invaluable. Once a bond of trust has been built between the two parties, you will be able to easily utilise their strengths. This could be brand awareness, when content is shared on the site or social media, click throughs from having links on your site, additional content for your site from them etc.
6. Cost
SEO not only allows for more traffic to be directed to your site, but it is a cost-effective marketing strategy. This is because the conversion rate is much greater. Due to the fact that your consumers are may proactively looking for your product, as opposed to annoying those who aren’t. This is especially true when you compare it to other forms of digital campaigns, such as display ads or social ads.
If you compare SEO to PPC e.g. Google ads, Search Engine Journal says it all here:
Still wondering whether to invest time effort and money into optimising your website your or are wondering how to build an SEO strategy? We could help with a free online marketing audit and SEO support for your business.
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