Is SEO worth the money?

As a small and medium-sized business, the marketing budget is always small as compared to the long list of marketing needs. Digital marketing offers so many exciting ways to grow awareness, brand engagement, leads, sales and market share. How should you prioritize the modest budget to select the opportunities that will deliver the best results?

This is where many businesses question the effectiveness of SEO. As a marketer, I always get asked if SEO is still relevant and valuable today? Is it too early or late to invest in an organic traffic marketing strategy?

The answer is both Yes and No. The Google algorithm has evolved so dramatically in the last few years that SEO has become a clear essential for all online businesses. Gone are the days of old SEO techniques where a single action of keyword stuffing on your website fetched you organic results.

If you have any concerns or doubts around SEO, perhaps due to a previous bad experience, don’t let that blind you to the reality of SEO today. Here are five essential rules of the online world.

1. SEO is more important than ever.
2. SEO is an essential discipline and set of activities that deliver steady growth now and into the future. It plays an important, well-established role in digital marketing strategy.
3. With the right SEO strategy and white-hat techniques, you will rank on page 1 of a growing list of high purchase intent Google Engine Search Results Pages (SERP).
4. SEO is proven in its ability to pull in more traffic than any other digital marketing strategy.
5. SEO is an organic way to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic.

What is new in SEO?

SEO has been around 1991. As businesses created websites, the search engines started to develop ways to help people find what they were looking for online. Search engines are used to match search results with user queries. The better the user experience, the more reliable the search engines are perceived, and over time we have adopted online search into our daily consumer habits.

As a result, many businesses started to rank on the 1st page of Google by keyword stuffing their website pages. Websites with impressive traffic could easily attract potential advertisers. They figured out a way to manipulate the search engines and make money. Additionally, there was also the problem of people using excessive and spammy backlinks to improve their authority.

By the 2000s Google started to take over. They defined the white hat SEO guidelines that would guide people to use healthy techniques instead of the old spamming ways. Google looked at the search engine as a whole web instead of just search queries. Their emphasis was on providing users with quality content instead of throwing more ads in their faces.

Since then, Google has made several changes to its algorithm, it even covers mobile versions of the websites.

Thus, it is clear to say that SEO is not dead, just some old techniques are. Google updates make sure it gets rid of poor-quality content at the top and gives place to more relevant and valuable content. A much-sophisticated search engine, Google now distinguishes between poorly optimized pages versus high-quality content on the websites.

Dangerous SEO practices:

1. Keyword stuffing
2. Spammy link building to site and many of the backlinking practices
3. Plagiarized content
4. Site not optimized for mobile
5. Slow or fishy sites
6. Cheesy Clickbait headlines

Why is organic traffic so important?

According to BrightEdge, organic traffic drives more than 51% of all visitors coming to websites. Paid sources attract 15% while social media contributes 5% to the overall traffic to the website. The study also pointed out that paid and organic search drives more than 70% of revenue for B2B and the other verticals.

Fundamentally, SEO is the top source of organic traffic across the internet. Plus, it offers powerful additional benefits to businesses.

5 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO

1. Builds Trust & Credibility

Good quality SEO work allows a website to create a clear, effective user-friendly experience. Optimizing on-page SEO, content and elements following the latest Google best practices builds your brand’s trust and credibility, will attract the best quality backlinks, and serve as a repository of valuable content for existing customers and new potential customers.

However, site authority cannot be built overnight. It takes consistent efforts and patience and valuable, quality products and services that get customer’s trust. Thus, SEO is a long-term strategy.

2. Better User Experience

Today, people ‘Google’ every time they are looking to buy a product or a service. It is natural that businesses want maximum visibility and better-quality traffic. But you can only achieve this if you offer an optimal user experience.

Google can distinguish between favourable and unfavourable user experiences, measured by data gathered during their site crawls, bounce rate, time on site, and other site visitor behaviour. Thus, it has become more crucial than ever to provide a positive user experience to a website. A website that offers information that a user is looking for in the least number of clicks, easily and quickly works in your favour.

3. Local SEO

As mobile traffic keeps rising optimizing your business for Local SEO has become essential for many small and medium-sized businesses. Local SEO works towards making your business appear in local searches within the vicinity of your business. This is done by optimizing your site and content with local connect as well as listing your business on the Google My Business page. Gaining favourable reviews on different platforms remains important too.

4. Cheap & Quantifiable

When compared to other digital marketing initiatives, SEO is cheaper with better long-term benefits to the brand. Take for example PPC vs SEO. Google Pay-Per-Click campaigns often command a monthly ad budget of $2000 or more to generate leads. As soon as you stop your paid ads the leads stop coming in.

With SEO the more you invest, the faster you will see results. SEO is a marketing strategy that can continue to deliver benefits into the future for your business.

Calculating ROI for SEO is not as straightforward as for PPC because the benefits build over time with SEO as compared to being a tap that is turned on or off for PPC. With proper tracking and analytics, you can understand the correlation between the SEO activities and the performance you are getting.

This is where you need to make sure you work with true SEO experts. There are many agencies offering SEO services, and many businesses buy cheap SEO which delivers little to no benefit at best and converts the website into a host for pernicious and malicious backlinks at worst.

Suggested For You To Read: How Much Does SEO Cost in 2021?

5. New Leads & Customers

SEO done well is powerful because of its ability to attract a growing volume of better quality, organic traffic to the website. This quality traffic is measured by the number of new enquiries, new leads and potential sales that are produced.

SEO helps a business in many ways. Investing in regular, monthly SEO over the long-term is a fundamental aspect of growing your business online presence, brand awareness and market-share.

To wrap up

I hope I have been able to help you understand the developments and best practices relevant today in the SEO world. Here are some final thoughts:

1. SEO maps out the buyer journey and strengthens the control you have over the customer’s buying cycle.
2. SEO best practices are being constantly updated by Google, so it’s essential to avoid activities that Google will penalize. A penalty can erase years of hard work in earning authority and reduce organic traffic to a trickle.
3. SEO is a long-term strategy. It is an investment in time, effort, and requires strategic thinking at the outset to outperform competitors. But this does not mean you will not see the impact for years. Even in the first year, a solid strategy and decent investment will deliver benefits to your business.
4. SEO targets user intent which translates into good quality organic traffic growth.
5. With voice search and AI taking centre stage, more SEO opportunities are becoming available.

Suggested For You To Read: How to Choose a B2B SEO Company

At Asset Digital Communications, we make sure our strategies from Day 1 work to get you the desired results. This is the reason we have successfully delivered value and results and to 100% of our SEO clients.

Get in touch with an SEO Expert in our team today!