Why Is SEO Important For Your Brand?

You’ve probably heard countless times that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important digital marketing tool. However, if you know what it is, you might not have a firm grasp on this complex and multifaceted tool.

SEO is made up of a various components. Understanding what they are and how they work is crucial to comprehending why SEO is so important. Inferentially, SEO is important because it increases the visibility of your website, which means more traffic and opportunities to convert prospects into customers. It’s also a great way to raise brand awareness, develop relationships with prospects, and establish yourself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert in your field. So, without further ado, here’s what you need to know about SEO and why it’s so important in today’s digital world.

The Essential Elements Of SEO

Keywords
The days of keywords being the only SEO technique that mattered are long gone, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still important. The difference today is that in order to be effective, keywords must be well-researched and carefully used in your content. But, exactly, what are keywords? Keywords are words and phrases that customers use to find online content. Then brands can use them to connect with customers looking for their products and services.
When looking for keywords, look for ones with high search rates and low competition, and incorporate short-tail keywords (e.g. dog), long-tail keywords (e.g. terrier puppies for sale), and local keywords (e.g. puppies for sale in Boston) into your content. Keywords can also be used to improve the titles, URLs, and other on-page SEO elements.

Content
Content is the vehicle you use to reach and engage audiences. Thus it is an essential component of SEO. For example, if you owned a nursery and wanted to increase your brand’s visibility, you could write a series of blogs about gardening, plant selection, growing tips, and other topics. When someone looking for information about gardening did a search, your blog would come up, and you’d be able to build a relationship with that person by providing useful information. You’d be the first nursery that came to mind if that prospect needed to buy a plant, for example. Today, content must be both educative and entertaining. It must also be relevant, engaging, and shareable. Content can take the following forms:

• Web content
• Blogs and Videos
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• E-books and whitepapers
• Social media posts

Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO depicts external optimization practices that take place outside of your site rather than on it. Backlink building is the most utilized off-page SEO technique. This is because quality backlinks from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality, which builds authority.

Guest blogging, creating a lot of infographics that will be widely shared, and mentioning influencers in your content are just a few of the current best practices for backlink building.

Local Search Engine Optimization
As more people use mobile devices to search, local SEO is becoming increasingly important. Tablets and smartphones now account for 57% of all searches, with half of those searches having a local intent.

If you owned a restaurant, for example, local SEO would ensure that people in your area found your website when looking for the best restaurants in town. Other local SEO best practices include claiming directory listings, creating location-specific pages for your website, and creating pages for your business on Google My Business, Google+, and Google Maps, in addition to using local keywords.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Paid marketing efforts such as native ads, Google AdWords, social media ads, pay-per-click, Google shopping ads, display ads, and more are referred to as search engine marketing (SEM).

Although search engine marketing (SEM) isn’t usually a big part of an overall SEO strategy, it has its place because it can help you reach new, highly targeted audiences.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) To Your Brand

Rankings and Visibility
Making it easier for prospects to find your brand when they search for something you have to offer, is one of the most important functions of SEO.

The higher you rank on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the more likely potential customers will see you and visit your website. The more effective your SEO efforts are, the higher your ranking and visibility will be, which is especially important given that a quarter of web users never go past the first SERP.

Web Traffic
One of the main goals of SEO is to increase web traffic, which you can do by increasing visibility and rankings. Consider this: the first ranking page receives nearly 33% of all clicks, and the first five listings receive over 75% of all clicks.

If you want more people to find your website through a search engine, you’ll need SEO techniques that will help you rank among the top five results.

Authority
Although the concept of authority is relatively new in SEO, it is becoming increasingly important to search engines as web users value it. Simply put, authority denotes that your website is dependable, of high-quality, relevant, and useful. The higher your site’s authority, the higher your ranking, and the more prospects will trust your brand.

Improves Visitor’s Experience

Another reason SEO is important is that it improves its usability, resulting in a smooth and positive customer experience. This is a result of all of the effort you expel on creating great content and optimizing your site with on-page SEO. When you take steps to make your site responsive, it will be accessible to all of your mobile visitors as well as those who visit from a laptop or desktop computer.

Increasing your page load speed will also reduce your bounce rate and encourage visitors to stay on your site longer. Nearly half of customers expect a page to load in under two seconds, and the longer it takes, the higher the bounce rate and the lower the conversion rate.

Brand’s Growth
Finally, SEO is critical because it can assist you in achieving many of your business objectives. SEO can help you improve your audience’s experience, increase your authority, drive more traffic to your site, gain an advantage over your competitors, and increase conversions, which means more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your company.

As you can see, SEO is a multifaceted endeavor involving a variety of techniques, tactics, and best practices. As consumers and web-user behaviors change, new technologies emerge, and search engines change their algorithms. These best practices are constantly evolving. However, SEO is still crucial for any company that wants to be found online, so your efforts are well worth it.

SEO can assist a company in achieving a variety of objectives, including brand awareness, traffic, conversions, customer experience, and much more. This is why it’s critical for digital marketers to understand what SEO is, how it can assist in achieving objectives, and what the most cutting-edge best practices are.