6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO

Organic Search Is The Majority Of Website Traffic

As a business website, the massive majority of your online traffic will be from organic search. This can even be true for a business that does no marketing – the simple fact of the matter is that a business will offer solutions (whether that be products or services) and people are always searching for solutions.

Organic search will always be a significant part of the buyer funnel and customer journey. It’s not just about users finding you for the first time: perhaps they find your business on social media but don’t convert, then the next day they decide to convert so they search Google for your website rather than searching on social media. So ensuring your website can show up in Google and rank well is not only important to target potential customers, it is also important as it can capture traffic for people who already know about your brand and want to convert on your website.

SEO Builds Trust

SEO can build trust. This can be perceived in various ways with multiple examples. Take the scenario in the previous paragraph where someone found your business on social media but then searched for your business on Google: research shows that many people do not trust a business if they do not have a website. If this user fails to find your website on Google, even though they already know about your brand, they probably will not trust your business and therefore will not convert.

Another way of building trust is through the common SEO technique of backlinking. If readers of relevant websites and sources of information are learning about your brand from press releases, news websites, how-to blogs etc then they will trust your brand more and see you as an authority on your subject. Branding is an integral part of SEO that many people do not understand or realise. Even when people are searching for your keywords and you show up on the first page, let’s not forget that the website is still competing for the click. On a single SERP there can be up to 10 organic listings in addition to various adverts, sponsored product listings, featured snippets, knowledge panels etc. If the searcher recognises your brand from your other SEO work, they will be more inclined to click on your website than the many others – because they trust your brand.

Better Qualified Traffic

If you’re working with a professional SEO in Manchester that knows what they’re doing, your website won’t only benefit from increased traffic but will also see better qualified traffic. Let’s take Blue Whale Media as an example: we offer various marketing and web design services. We also regularly publish new content and blogs on the website. If we have a lot of traffic on our blogs, that’s cool to have, but they are not qualified traffic. This is because we want our users to see our service pages and turn into a customer: people who are reading our blogs, whether they be tips or how-to guides etc, are probably not going to convert into a customer. In this example, better qualified traffic would mean an increase in organic traffic to our key service landing pages: these people are actively searching for our service and will be much more likely to convert into a lead and eventually a customer.

SEO Is Evolving

SEO is always evolving and updating. Whether that be trends, Google algorithm updates or best practices – the fact is SEO in 2010 is different to SEO in 2021, and SEO today is going to be different to SEO in 2031.

SEO Is Long-Term

SEO is a long-term strategy and it can take a while to see noticeable changes, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for an SEO agency to tell a client that they aren’t going to see any major increase in traffic until at least 6 months into their SEO campaign – that’s half a year!

If you plan on hiring an SEO agency or consultant to deal with your website SEO, you need to understand it’s an on-going plan and long-term strategy. It’s not a tap you can turn on and off at will. Even if you hit your goals and you rank number one for your keywords, if you just suddenly stop doing SEO work then soon enough you will see your positions drop down.

This links into the “SEO is evolving” point – SEO evolves because Google is constantly changing. What Google sees as high-quality content at the start of the year will probably be different by the end of the year. Anyone can see this – just do a quick Google search for absolutely anything right now and take a note of the organic listings on the first page. Come back in 6 months and do the exact same search and I can guarantee the websites will be in different places on the page and there will probably even be different websites on the page as well.

First Page Isn’t Good Enough Anymore

Everyone knows that you need to be on the first page of the search results in order to get any traffic. In fact, that’s quite an old statement. In 2021, you really need to be ranking in the top three results in order to capture organic website traffic. According to the statistics, the first three search results will take over half of all the organic clicks (62.7% to be precise) – this means that the remaining 7 results are left to compete for the remaining clicks. Being on the first page is a great indicator that your page is doing well in the eyes of search engines, but you probably aren’t going to see a lot of website traffic if you fail to break into the top three results.