Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. The more relevant your website becomes to a search query, the more your site would come up when a user of a search engine is looking for certain keywords. By effectively using SEO, a website can continue to rise in the search engine rankings and continue to grow it's relevancy.
Hence SEO is very necessary to an online business. But what exactly is the impact of a SEO strategy on your site?
Generation of Traffic
The most important benefit of SEO is that you can generate traffic to your site. Not just any traffic but targeted traffic by people actively searching for your keywords. These are not random surfers, these are people who are actively searching for a product or service and a place to buy it. The higher up the list of a search your website is, the higher chance that someone searching for your product will choose your site to buy it.
Since over 90% of traffic to a given search term is focused on the first page of search results, it goes without saying that the higher your site ranks for a given term the better.
SEO Improves User Experience
Reduced Cost of Promotion
With the greater increase in traffic that successful SEO can bring, the amount of active promotion you will need to spend money on is reduced. So once you have created a page that search engines rate highly, the page will continue to bring in visitors for a long time to come. While doing research and writing content for SEO may take time if you choose to do it yourself, or an investment if you hire a digital marketing agency, your very valuable spot on the search engine rankings can never be bought out from under you by a competitor.
A Long-Term Success Strategy
While it's always great to have SEO strategies on any website, if they aren't being evaluated and updated over time they will reach a point where they are no longer as effective as they once were. So being proactive and watching for any major changes in the Google algorithm or your page ranking is crucial to maintaining your spot and not being overtaken by your competitors. A successful SEO strategy will have an impact that can last for several years, and continuing to commit to SEO best practices will increase that impact.
All brands and companies can benefit from implementing an effective SEO strategy. It is critical for any business to maintain their ranking on search engines to keep ahead of competitors, and to find the customers that are actively searching for their products.