If you want your website to offer a serious contribution to your business in terms of finding and retaining new customers then you need to have a well thought out search engine marketing strategy.The reality is most web users start their online journey with a search query in one of the major search engines – so if you don’t rank for your product or services it is going to be very difficult for potential customers to find you.
Factor in the stat that around 60% of users click a link on the first page of the search engine results and you can see the importance of investing time and energy in your search engine marketing efforts.
A good SEO strategy will combine intelligent keyword research that targets potential customers (not just chase traffic for traffic’s sake) with a holistic approach to the structure and design of your site. Once that is in place you will need to consider link building and online profile building both time consuming but incredibly powerful tools for improving your rank.
If you make the leap and hire an seo professional or decide you or someone in your organisation has the time for some diy seo you can expect to see the following benefits for your website and your business.
Improved search results across the board – Google is by far and away the market leader when it comes to search and therefore most company’s seo strategies focus on seducing the Googlebot. However if you do you optimisation correctly you will see your traffic grow from other major search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, Ask etc.)
A better class of customer – not only will your search engine traffic grow over time but the customers you attract are far more likely to make a purchase or get in touch. A visit to your site was started by someone entering a question into a search engine which the search engine decided your website answered – by the time to get to your site they are well on the way to engaging with your business.
A better class of website – clear and well labelled navigation and site structure, great website design and professional coding along with a website brimming with original content is the (deceptively) simple recipe for search engine success. By providing all these things in the pursuit of the favour of the search engines you will all create a website your visitors will love and will be happy to recommend.
Brand benefits – as your search engine performance improves and you prominence on the search engine results is cemented, customers will start to make the mental link between your business and the keywords they used to generate the search. People also tend to assume that sites that consistently appear on the first pages as having more authority than those appearing down the rankings.
In it to win it – if your website has not made it onto the front page of the search engine results page but your competitor site is sat in pole position then you are making it easy for potential customers to ignore you and spend their money elsewhere.
