SEO is significant in any business’ marketing, and in 2021 it is becoming a crucial component of a successful strategy.
As COVID 19 is coming to an end, and businesses are slowly going back to normal, it is important for businesses to start getting everything back on track and planning ahead, to ensure they can generate more website traffic and improve lead generation and sales in the coming months.
92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps. (Spark Toro)
SEO is an important process of improving your website’s online visibility on search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo and more. We often have businesses approach our team at Bold x Collective and ask us why they need SEO and how it will benefit their business.
What is SEO and Why Do I Need It?
If you’ve been looking for ways to increase traffic to your website, then you may have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you don’t really know what it entails, keep reading! As the name implies, SEO is a method of optimizing your website, and thus achieving a higher ranking in search engines’ organic results. It accomplishes this by making your website more relevant when keywords are being typed into search engines. It is also a way to enhance your website structure and technical background, making it user-friendly, faster in speed and easier to navigate.
Google, the most sophisticated search engine, uses a strict algorithm that all the big players take advantage of. When anything is searched on it, all of the results that are returned on the first few pages would most likely have had extensive work done in SEO.
Can I Run My Business without SEO?
You can try, but you’ll be doing yourself no favours. Running a successful business without SEO fine-tuning is a challenging endeavour especially nowadays. Your website will miss out on valuable traffic and lose customers to your competitors. Don’t get me wrong. The only old-fashioned methods of handing out business cards, putting up signs, knocking on doors and cold calling is admirable, but if you want to run a successful enterprise, SEO is necessary to reach prospective customers efficiently.
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How Effective Is SEO Exactly?
Here is a chart by Finances Online that showcases just how effective SEO can be. You can see that the percentage of population making searches every day has increased year by year and is at its all-time high in 2021. In addition, you can see that monthly SEO is a strategy that most clients prefer, as it is a significant investment, that will show a return when done consistently. Lastly, you can see the breakdown components of Google’s ranking algorithm, where trust and domain authority, link popularity, anchor text and on-page keyword usage are all significant to ranking higher on Google’s algorithm.
Is SEO Important for My Business?
We can all agree that the market is incredibly competitive nowadays in the majority of industries. Think of SEO as your ticket to compete.
Here are a few more statistics for 2021, from Junto Digital.
- 57% of digital marketers state that SEO is the most effective marketing strategy.
- 61% of people do some kind of research online before making ANY purchasing decisions.
- 81% of people do some kind of research online before making a LARGE purchase.
- 75% of people never check the pages after the initial results on search engines like Google.
As you can see, SEO is an essential digital marketing initiative for any online business today.
Should My Business Stop Doing SEO Once It Has Traffic?
Let’s say you’ve already paid for SEO services and your business is thriving more than ever, after a few years of the SEO taking its effect. Does that mean you don’t need to worry about it anymore? WRONG!
SEO is an ongoing job, and you always need to maintain it to keep it up to date with the current market. In addition, your business would also need to focus on SEO for all the new content you have on your website, whether it’s new blogs, products or website pages. You shouldn’t entirely neglect the SEO that you’ve worked on already though. You don’t want your content to have an early gravestone on the last few pages in search engine results, right?
Now to help you guys out with a little terminology!
What is On-site SEO?
On-site SEO is basically everything that you do on your website directly to make it rank on search engines like Google. It means all of your content should have meta descriptions, tags and categories based on keywords depending on your market audience. It also means you need to have the right amount of content on EVERY ASPECT of your site. Here are a few factors when dealing with SEO:
- Is the meta description for search engines too long?
- Is the content length per paragraph in a blog you have too short?
- How many and what kinds of words should I use for my products titles?
- What kind of alt text should I use for my images?
- How does the readability of my site fare in terms of my target audience?
- Am I overusing or under-using keywords in some areas of my site?
- Are the keywords consistent enough on my site? How do I know if they are or aren’t?
- Does my site load fast enough for users not to bounce from it?
- Do I have enough user interaction on my website to keep people from leaving?
Those are just some aspects of on-site SEO, but there are many more. It may seem a little daunting, but it’s all important business. Google and all major search engines take into account all of those details. And it can be very time consuming, which is why many businesses hire digital marketing agencies like Bold x Collective to handle their SEO related work.
What is Off-site SEO?
Off-site SEO is another easy term. It encompasses everything that you do off your website to have it rank better on search engines. Social media, podcasts, events, reviews, forums, guest blogging, Q&A and more are considered off-page SEO, but I think you get it. Off-site SEO is important, as is also an essential part of growing your business. The more platforms you have your quality content on, the more people you will reach and the more people you reach and click on your website the better it will rank on search engines. Making sure you do these things will definitely set you apart and will help your business grow.
Search engine optimization is going to be important for a long time to come. SEO takes some time to kick in, so it’s important to plan ahead and crate a strategy for your business. Our team at Bold x Collective specializes in SEO services and has worked with well-known brands with a strong digital presence.
