Can you remember those days when we used Yellow Pages to search for a business or a service?
Well, those days are long gone in today’s marketplace. The Internet, more specifically search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, have replaced the Yellow Pages, or at least become the most common way for customers to find the products or services they seek. This means that your company should be easily visible to customers when they are looking for a specific product, service or any other information, which is why SEO is so important.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the technique of obtaining better visibility for your website or a web page in a search engine’s results – Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc. Generally, a website or webpage has a better chance of attracting visitors when ranked at, or near, the top of the search result page, and the more frequently it appears in the search result list. This is because more and more people are using the Internet, and the number of people using search engines is growing daily. In fact, if you think about it, on a typical day, you might use search engines yourself more than once, e.g., search for a restaurant, accommodation for your next holiday, or an advertising agency to create a website for you. Etc. These days whatever we need, we “Google it” and find that we are provided with a ranked list of the websites that the search engine has determined to be the most relevant to our query.
How do search engines choose their results?
We know that the Internet is made up of trillions of individual pages. When we look for something, the search engine (quickly!) navigates the web by following links from one page to another. These are stored in an index (think of it as a massive library where each page is sorted by its content and other factors). Then the search engine, using algorithms, tracks the pages that are the most relevant to our query, ranks the results and shows them to us in descending order. You could say that by using SEO, we help search engines figure out what each web page is about and how it may be helpful to people searching for what we provide.
What are the advantages of using SEO?
• SEO increases traffic to your site and the visibility of your branding.
Ensuring that your business can be found when people search online will tremendously impact your business. This massive opportunity will improve your chances of attracting many more customers. Think about the web as your city, where more people than the shops in secondary locations pass the shops in the most central positions. This is because the greater ‘footfall’ gives them more chance of attracting people into their shop. The same applies to your website. The more people who see your website/web page, the more they will stop and buy something.
• SEO boosts your business’s credibility.
High search rankings make your company more credible in the eyes of potential customers.
If your website or web page is continually displayed at the top of search results, potential customers will feel that you must be doing the most business for a good reason. This makes them more likely to do business with you and save themselves from wasting more time searching.
• SEO is the foundation of your online presence
With SEO, you don’t have to convince potential customers that they need your product or service because, in reality, they have already decided to purchase the product/service that you are offering. Instead, they want to know who to buy it from, so your company has to show up high in their search results to convince them that you are the right business to purchase from.
Compared to other forms of online marketing like PPC (pay-per-click), which may drive more revenue, and social media, which boosts your brand image, your SEO, in many ways, remains the foundation of your online presence.
• SEO is cost-effective
Optimizing your page enables your website to gain a new client base that you currently might not be targeting. And at a reasonable cost (the cost of implementing your SEO), compared to, for example, pay-per-click, where each visitor costs you money. It might take time to reach the top of the search engines, but staying there will bring continued traffic while buying advertisements can bring in people short term. Still, advertisements have to be purchased on an ongoing basis indefinitely.
So let us help you implement and improve your SEO, successfully market your company and guarantee that you have the best chance of reaching the only page that matters on search engines – Page 1.
