Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is the process of optimising your website to improve its performance on search engines like Google. This is conducted through on-page SEO, which includes focusing on improving the content and optimising the images on a site; off-page SEO, which looks at external factors that can affect your website; and technical SEO, which looks at – you guessed it – the more ‘technical’ side of a website to help it be visible and rank in search engines.
What are the benefits of SEO?
SEO offers many benefits to businesses. It builds up the authority and trust of your business, as well as its organic visibility in search engines, thus helping to increase traffic to a website. It provides the opportunity to reach a wider audience made up of people who are looking specifically for your services or solutions to problems you can solve.
What’s more, over time, SEO is a much more cost-effective strategy, providing a greater return on investment. SEO isn’t a quick-fix solution for generating leads, as it takes time to ensure a site is optimised for SEO, and to build up consistent, quality content that will improve your rankings and encourage users to click through from search results. Still, once a good standing is achieved, you’re on to a winner.
Yield over time – the long-term benefits of SEO
When it comes to online marketing, many businesses want results right away. If you’re investing your hard-earned money into marketing, of course you want to know that it’s working and is getting you business. At the end of the day, leads or sales are the ultimate proof of that.
However, generating more business online could be compared to choosing a snack to give yourself some energy. You have two options: you could choose a chocolate bar, which tastes great and provides you with an instant sugar rush – only for you to crash once the sugar hit wears off – or you could choose a banana, which might not taste as great while you’re eating it, and you won’t feel an instant boost, but it will fill you up and provide you with a slow and steady release of energy, keeping you going until your next meal.
To put this into marketing terms, let’s say you’re running a Google Ads campaign, or a Facebook Ads campaign, and that’s your sole marketing focus. The campaign is going well, and you’re generating a steady number of leads. But then, due to unforeseen circumstances, you need to claw back on your outgoings due to cashflow issues, for example, and you make the decision to stop your ads campaign.
As soon as you stop the ads, they stop being put in front of your audience – meaning you also stop receiving enquiries immediately. This results in a drop in business, making your cashflow issues even worse, so to start getting enquiries again you have to resume the campaign and pump in more budget. What’s more, paid ads campaigns often take a while to truly kick in again once they’re resumed to get back to performing at optimum levels, so those steady enquiries you were receiving beforehand may take a while to start coming back.
Now let’s say that instead of a paid ads campaign, you were investing in an SEO campaign. It’s the same situation, and you make the decision to cut your SEO budget. When you do this, Google (or any other search engine) doesn’t know that you’ve ‘stopped’ doing SEO and won’t axe all of your rankings, because the content that has been published as part of the SEO is still all there and visible, answering searchers’ questions, showcasing your knowledge and authority, and providing value to your target audience. All the SEO work undertaken behind the scenes to ensure your site meets search engine criteria, loads quickly and provides quality user experience doesn’t just disappear either – it continues to deliver.
Yes, the search world does develop and search engines roll out algorithm updates, and your site wouldn’t be generating regular content anymore, so eventually, your site would start to diminish from an SEO standpoint, but this wouldn’t happen overnight. It would be a slow and gradual process that could take months or even years, depending on how competitive your industry is. Thus, you’ll still receive business through your website as a result of SEO, even if and when you decide to stop pumping budget into it – making it a much more cost-effective solution in the long term.
Therefore, if you’re looking for a marketing option that will provide long-lasting business and compound over time, giving a better yield in the long term, SEO is for you. If you’re looking for a quick burst of leads over a short time period, or you have a fixed, limited budget, consider a medium like paid advertising.
If you’d like to discuss the benefits of SEO or any other online marketing service and determine what medium would be best suited to your business, reach out to our team here at Engage Web today and we’ll be happy to help.
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