SEO: The Foundation of Online Marketing
SEO is the foundation of any online marketing strategy and vital to a website’s success. You might be marketing your website either through PPC, social media and other means and not realize the importance of SEO. Let me explain why good SEO is important, regardless of whatever other efforts you put into online marketing.
Having a good website that will rank high on Google entails having meaningful and relevant content, a good load time (slower websites rank lower), and a structure and design that creates a good visitor experience. Without this, other marketing strategies will fail.
Part of SEO includes creating content that is relevant and meaningful. This is important because it will create a user base that wants to revisit your website and ultimately lead to more conversions. So, for example, if you have slow load times or users cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave, regardless of where the traffic comes from. Also, this impacts your search actual engine rankings. Having a slow website or a website that doesn’t have enough content will have a negative impact on your website’s search engine rankings. A lot of things are taken into account when determining where your website will rank.
You can spend a ton of money on targeting keywords with PPC and other means, but if your website isn’t meaningful and loads slow, you will lose out on potential customers.
Search engine algorithms are getting increasingly better at focusing on user experience, which includes things like load time and relevant content. It doesn’t make sense to invest in other marketing strategies if your user experience isn’t good. By creating a good user experience, you are helping your SEO strategy.
Furthermore, if the goal is to increase website traffic, then showing up higher on search engines will inevitably produce more visibility and clicks. The #1 spot on Google for any given keyword gets nearly 32% of all clicks.
The higher you rank on a search engine (SERP), the more likely prospective customers will see your website and click through, ultimately leading to more sales. It is key to increase your organic page ranking. The more effective your SEO efforts, the higher you will rank, leading to more visibility and click-throughs. It is important to note that only a quarter of web users never click past the first SERP.