How critical is SEO for
Online Business
Search marketing strategy
is critical to online success. The amount of traffic (visitors) you drive to
your website directly impacts the return on investment that will generate, and search
is the one of the primary sources of website traffic.
The goal for each and
every website differs whether the goal of your website is to generate calls,
leads, and sales or even just brand awareness, search marketing should be on
your radar if you want to meet the targets.
When we talk about search
marketing, what do we mean?
There are millions upon
millions of web pages available online, with more being added every minute.
Search engines exist to help users find the information they want online as
quickly and easily as possible, without having to waste time crawling through
irrelevant or poor-quality content before finding what they really need.
Why does this matter to your
business?
Where your website ranks
in searches for relevant keywords, terms, and phrases can make an enormous difference
to the amount of traffic you receive – and in turn how many leads or sales your
website generates for your business.
While you may assume your
website will be automatically found by search engines, and to an extent this is
true, there are a number of actions you can take to improve where you rank, and
for which keywords or phrases. Most people don’t browse past the first page of
search results, so if your website is displayed on any page other than the
first, searchers are unlikely to even see it.
Search Engine Optimization
With the rate of growth of
the internet, the people who build and run the search engines hardly have time
to manually sort and rate the content – so they write complex algorithms which
assess and rank the WebPages automatically, and display them on search engine
results pages in descending order according to their relevance and quality.
There are a number of
elements on your website relating to your code, content, and structure which
affect how relevant these algorithms consider your website, and thus how well
your site ranks in search. Making sure your site is set up as well as possible
for this purpose is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and involves
things like reviewing and editing your content, titles, and Meta descriptions.
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click or PPC
advertising is paying to have your website displayed as one of the paid
listings on the results page. As a high level overview, you bid for the
best-placed spot and pay that amount for each click you get – hence, “pay per
click”.
Which one should I use?
PPC is a shorter-term
strategy that gets immediate results, while SEO is a longer-term strategy which
takes time and consistent work to show results – however those results tend to
last and also hold more weight compared to PPC listings, which are visibly
marked as ads and therefore may be skipped over by some. Your SEO work can also
impact the performance of your PPC campaigns. For these reasons, the best
search marketing strategy combines elements of both SEO and PPC.
Having some kind of search
marketing incorporated into your online campaign is critical to your online
success, as your position in search engines directly affects your traffic
volumes and in turn the results you get from your website, whether your KPI is traffic,
leads, calls, or sales.
If you’re not sure where
to start, or would like some help setting up and optimizing your campaign,
reach out to the experts at Brinok for a free consultation.
