It comes as no surprise to us that more and more marketers are prioritizing SEO in their overall strategy. In Hubspot’s 2021 Not Another State of Marketing Report, 40% of marketers surveyed said that SEO is their primary approach to marketing and the amount of marketers investing in SEO increased from 64% in 2020 to 69% in 2021.
At its core, Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing the content on your website to increase visibility in search results pages, thereby increasing the quality and quantity of your organic search visitors. Below, we outline key reasons why SEO needs to be a top consideration for your business’s marketing plan.
1. SEO will become your most cost-effective cost per lead
I have said this a lot to clients recently so let me explain: SEO is the one digital advertising channel that has decreased costs and increased effectiveness over time. With Paid Search, you have to expand geos, bid on more competitive keywords and continue to pay per-click as you grow. As competition builds around you, your clicks become more and more expensive.
Programmatic advertising also shows us an example of increased costs with growth: the more markets that require your brand awareness and the larger your audience grows, the more impressions you have to buy every year.
Even though SEO is a long-term strategy that could take 1-2 years to substantially increase actual leads generated, once it hits the point of “snowball effect”, the need for aggressive SEO investments start to wane, and the amount of traffic to your website exponentially increases.
2. Organic search leads have the highest purchase intent
Another cost-effective element of SEO comes from the fact that SEO allows your website to show up in front of users who are actively searching for something relevant to your business. We call these users bottom of the funnel users – someone that is looking to purchase something right here and right now.
When your business is first on the Google search results page for someone searching for “architect Colorado”, you can be very certain that they are in fact looking for an architect in Colorado.
3. SEO optimizes performance for your most important asset – your website
One of my favorite aspects of SEO is that it is an operational necessity in addition to a marketing necessity. With your website being the most valuable asset to your business development, a great SEO team will give it keen oversight, performance optimizations, mobile optimizations and content production.
A high-performing website with valuable and engaging content means an optimized path to showing users why they need to hire your business over all others.
4. SEO increases your overall website engagement
If your overall traffic in Google Analytics is showing high bounce rates, low pages per session and low time per spent per session, take a gander at your Organic Search channel data. Quite often, this channel is your most engaged source of traffic with the lowest bounce rates, highest pages per session and highest time spent per session. The question to digital marketers becomes, “How can we leverage this channel even more?”
With an investment in SEO, we are actively increasing traffic from the Organic Search channel, which helps boost the overall engagement rate throughout the site. Additionally, by creating search-driven content, we are delivering resourceful information that users are looking for.
5. SEO allows you to gain visibility over competitors
Your competitors might be outspending you with paid advertising dollars, but with a proactive approach to SEO, we can strategize how to earn a greater share-of-voice within a search engine results page.
For example, your competitors might be ranking for 1000 keywords. However, our team can uncover 1000 other keywords that users are actively searching for that aren’t included in your competitor’s rankings. The goal is to work your way up to positionally rank for the same keywords your competitors are ranking for, so your website shows up in a higher position on a search results page.
6. SEO gives your business instant credibility
Google takes a lot of steps to ensure their users have a great experience using their search engine. When they announced their Page Experience update in May 2020, Google made it clear that they wanted their users to have fast page speeds and seamless mobile experiences.
When your site starts showing up on the first page of Google search results, a user should expect it is the most relevant resource for what they are looking for. This userʻs trust in Google expands to trust in the business that shows up first, which boosts that business’s credibility immediately.
Additionally, a great Local SEO program can help increase and monitor your Google My Business reviews which is integral to a buyer’s decision making process.
Last Thoughts
With SEO being such a long-term approach, the first year of investing in SEO can be a big bite to chew on. But in the end, the long-term benefits of SEO create a sustainable and ever-growing funnel of qualified website visitors which will increase your ROI substantially.
