“To be or not to be” seems to be quite a philosophical question, especially in the context of running a business, but Hamlet’s life dilemma sounds surprisingly similar to one of the biggest concerns of many people who are running their own businesses. In their case, though, there are available much simpler and more effective solutions than Hamlet could ever hope for. One of them is SEO.
Behind this inconspicuous three-letter abbreviation hides one of the most powerful tools that can elevate any business running in the digital era to a whole new level, regardless of its size or location. But is really the importance of SEO so high? How it’s possible that the benefits are so great without any hidden catch? And, most importantly, how SEO can help your business?
Today, courtesy of Maciej Cherubin, SEO Specialist at Octamedia SEO Agency, we will give you the answers to the above questions and tell you more about the world of possibilities and opportunities available thanks to SEO.
What is SEO and why is it important?
Usually when you look for information on SEO, you get different definitions – from highly technical to extremely simple ones, but all of them can be summarized as “the process and practices that are meant to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of that website in the search engine results”. Quite simple at the first glance, but there’s much more to SEO than that.
By looking at the above definition you may already suspect why is SEO important for business: without SEO it is absolutely possible for your website (and thus your business) to be completely absent from the Internet – like it never existed in the first place. This happens when your website is undiscoverable by the search engine crawlers (spiders) that are responsible for indexing the site. Without indexing, the website cannot be displayed on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and nobody can find your business through organic search results. Pretty scary, isn’t it? But SEO can help you with that, ensuring that your website is discoverable and possible to index.
Why is SEO important for businesses?
There’s no simple answer to that, because SEO affects your business in many, many ways – or, more precisely, SEO may affect your business, if you decide to invest in it. Yes, you’re not mistaken: we just used that dreadful, fearful, almost forbidden word “investment” and you wouldn’t be a real businessperson if you wouldn’t care. After all one of the fundamental rules of every business is extremely simple: where’s an investment, there should be a return. It’s perfectly normal to be at least somewhat reluctant to invest in SEO without knowing the possible gains and benefits. So, without any further ado, let’s get straight to the business – your business, actually, and a plethora of advantages you can get thanks to investing in SEO. One of the most important gains is…
Visibility
And visibility is god nowadays, at least on the Internet. If your business is invisible on SERPs, it’s as good as dead. Zombified at best. Well, even if your business is not literally dying at the moment, you still lose a lot when compared to all your competition that IS visible in Google. Why? It’s simple: they earn more while you earn less. This means that you’re on the straight road to history – the one written by winners. And without visibility on SERPs you’re always on the losing side. There’s one more important thing to be aware of: higher visibility in SERPs directly translates to the volume of…
Traffic
If visibility is god, then traffic is its avatar. And you want to have as large traffic as possible, because the more people visit your website, the higher the chance of some of them wanting to buy your products or use your services. However, a random bunch of people not really interested in what your business is about and what your offer is won’t make a real change, right? That’s where SEO comes in like a knight in the shining armor to save the day: thanks to SEO you can increase the visibility of your business to the ideal target group, thus increasing the number of potential customers who will visit your website. It’s called targeted traffic. And this directly leads to…
Conversions
More high-quality, targeted traffic obviously means more customers who are genuinely interested in what you offer, but the fact that they visited your website doesn’t necessarily mean that they will buy anything. You have to convince them to do so – and that’s another opportunity for SEO to rise and shine. How can SEO help your business in this regard? For starters, by providing as much relevant and valuable information about your products and services as possible. This alone still may not be enough, but SEO is more than just the content – properly implemented SEO will improve your website itself, making it easier to navigate, faster to load, friendlier to use and more compatible with whatever device your audience uses to browse the Internet.
Long-time results
Last but definitely not least is the fact that SEO gives your business long-lasting results, but not without a price: it takes some time to get significant results, but once they do appear, they last. Nothing in the digital era is eternal, though, so you will have to maintain your SEO, but for significantly less money than any PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign would require. And the results won’t disappear the day you stop paying for the clicks – they will still be there, but in time your position will decline without SEO. But again: SEO is way cheaper than any other method of increasing the online presence of your business.
Conclusion
Hopefully we were able to show you why is SEO important for your business and why investing in SEO is one of the best investments you could ever make if you run a business nowadays. There’s no exaggeration in saying that without SEO your business is bound to fail on the highly competitive digital market, where visibility is one of the most important parts of the success. Don’t let your competition get ahead of you – invest in SEO and reap the rewards as soon as you can!
This article was written in collaboration with Maciej Cherubin, SEO Specialist at Octamedia SEO Agency.
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