11 Impressive Benefits of SEO for Your Business

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. That means that Search Engine Optimization — or SEO — is increasingly important for businesses in the age of digital media. 

If you're not familiar with SEO and have just begun advertising, or have been relying on personal recommendations to get the word out there, it's time to learn more about it.

Here are all of the benefits of SEO and the reasons you should be using it for your business.

1. It Improves Your Search Engine Visibility

The most obvious and yet most important benefit of SEO is that it improves your search engine visibility.

Only 0.78% of Google searches result in a click on the second page. That means, for the most part, people are looking for results on the first page and the most efficient and effective way to rank is by using SEO. 

While SEO is only one part of advertising, search engines are perhaps the most commonly used tool to find services and products. 

2. The Effects Are Long-Lasting

SEO benefits are extremely long-lasting, more so than other types of advertising.

If you have a poster on a billboard for a period of time, people will likely forget about it as soon as it's gone. However, if you've ranked on Google even for a short period of time, many people have likely bookmarked your site, seen it and mentioned it to others, and a whole host of other things that mean you'll linger in their memories.

Even if you stop ranking or a competitor overtakes you, you'll feel those residual effects.

3. It Improves Credibility

People see Google as a very credible company. They trust the people that Google is willing to recommend, and they believe that the sites at the top of Google are endorsed by the search engine.

This is sometimes true, sometimes not. The main takeaway, however, is that if you rank at the top of Google, your credibility will improve.

People are very wary of being scammed online and for good reason, as it happens fairly often. Establishing yourself as legitimate is one of the hardest things to do in the beginning, and one of the huge reasons why SEO for businesses is so important — because it can do that for you.

4. It Improves Local Visibility

Of all the types of SEO, keywords are very important — especially for local visibility.

Many people are often searching for things like:

• service near location
• product near me
• service in location

Incorporating this type of keyword on your site can help pinpoint you to a local area. For some brands that ship all over the country and don't have an in-person location for customers to visit, this may not matter.

However, for services performed in one city, town, or state, this is crucial to bringing in more customers.

Make sure you take a good look at local SEO and ensure you're getting the most out of it.

5. It Helps Networking

One thing that seriously helps your Google ranking is back links. This includes back links to other sites from your pages as well as people linking to yours.

You can backlink to others when you need to include statistics or authoritative sources on a topic. Make sure you pick news, education, or government sites that aren't considered competitors, as you don't want to redirect customers away from you and onto another company!

You can also try and do some original research to encourage backlinking to you, or agree on a guest post strategy with another company.

All in all, this not only improves your rankings, but it helps networking. While a little friendly competition never hurts anyone, you also want to be on good terms with the other people in your industry and work with those in related industries. That helps draw more people to you.

6. It's Accessible

SEO may seem like a very intimidating concept, but it isn't hard to learn about.

You can take courses or classes to learn about it and try to understand it. Even if you aren't an expert, it's easy to pick up little tips and tricks that will seriously help you.

That makes it a lot easier to implement than some bigger forms of advertising that may not even be as effective. 

7. It Makes Your Website Better

SEO also makes your website better, and not just because it's ranking on Google.

SEO, a lot of the time, is formed around making your website more user-friendly, as these are the kind of sites Google wants to recommend. That means that your website, as a byproduct of SEO, simply becomes better.

For example, SEO likes white space and readability. If you have massive chunky paragraphs on your site full of technical information, you may have inadvertently been turning people off — which SEO tactics will now fix!

Google also likes images and videos on a page, as long as they don't influence the load time too heavily. You'll then learn better and more visual ways to advertise and create a more attractive design as a whole.

8. It's Inexpensive

SEO is, for the most part, inexpensive — even if you're starting from scratch with limited knowledge.

If you want to learn how to do it yourself and take classes and courses, that's certainly doable and you'll be feeling the effects on your company for a long time — in a great way!

If you choose a reputable company like Direction to help out with your SEO then it's still likely not going to be as expensive as you think. SEO draws in so many new customers and clients that the cost is likely to balance itself out in no time, so always consider the benefits against the initial upfront cost.

If you do choose to outsource your SEO, you can always compare costs, but make sure you don't just automatically go with the cheapest option. Remember, the benefits of good SEO will financially help you in the long run! 

9. It Helps Your Knowledge

In the world of digital media and advertising reigning supreme, it's important to keep up to date with the latest trends in this area. Easier said than done of course, since everything is always changing, but learning about SEO will help your knowledge surrounding this immensely.

There are some things that will likely be more timeless, at least for the age of the internet — such as keywords helping search rankings. However, even for the things that change as time goes on, learning SEO will give you a good idea of those trends.

Search Engine Optimization is here to stay, so it's worth taking the time to learn rather than resisting. 

10. Traffic Is More Targeted

One of the great things about SEO is that the traffic is more targeted because of keyword usage.

If you have a bunch of people coming to your website, you want to make sure they're actually interested in the service you're offering. Putting up a billboard or posters can attract some business, but for the most part, 99% of the people passing by that poster aren't interested in getting a lawyer, a cash offer on their house, etc.

The people coming to your website via organic traffic have been specifically searching for a business like yours. That means there's much more of a chance they're going to utilize the service you're providing or buy the products you're producing.

11. You Can Overtake Competitors

Part of good SEO is learning how to do better than your competitors and get more business than them. Some SEO programs even have tools where you can plug in a competitor's site and see what they're ranking for you that you aren't.

While it's important to be on good terms with competitors in the industry, you still have to look out for yourself and make sure you can get ahead. Climbing above competitors on Google is one surefire way to do this and if they're ranking for keywords you aren't, it's time to integrate those. 

There Are Numerous Benefits of SEO

There are many benefits of SEO and if you haven't been utilizing it, it's never too late. Digital advertising is so important these days and with the amount of traffic that comes from organic search engines, you can't afford not to.

Overtake competitors, discover how cost-efficient it is, and work hard to rank high on Google and you'll soon be struggling to keep up with the number of customers or clients on your website!

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