Search engine optimisation (SEO) is important for any individual or business that wants to have any sort of online presence. There’s simply no way around that fact.
If you want to be found in Google search results, you need some form of SEO. But how much you need to focus on SEO is going to differ depending on your industry, budget, and business operations.
Below, I’ll explain why SEO is important for your business, and when it might not be as important as other factors.
5 Key Reasons Your Business Needs SEO
1. Better Online Visibility
The whole point of SEO is to optimise your website for search engines (although you should also be optimising for users of course). What happens when a site is well optimised for search engines? It can start appearing more often in search results.
You get in front of more people, some of whom might just click through to your website.
Voila: increased visibility.
Of course, SEO takes time and effort. Just implementing a keyword strategy and optimising your title tags isn’t going to skyrocket your rankings overnight.
But a sustained effort to improve your website’s SEO can lead to improved rankings for keywords that are important to your business. And this increased visibility can lead to…
2. Increased Organic Traffic
Getting in front of more people searching for terms related to your business can lead to more people visiting your website. This is known as organic traffic—i.e., traffic you haven’t paid for with ads.
But it’s important to note here that the right SEO strategy for your business doesn’t just generate more traffic. It generates more high-quality traffic.
This is traffic made up of people likely to be interested in what you offer. Whether it’s products or services, SEO can help put you in front of your potential customers when they’re searching for things related to your business.
3. It Can Be Free
That’s right: SEO can be free. It’s not always free, like when you hire a quality SEO consultant (like me!).
But you can implement lots of useful SEO strategies and tips all by yourself without spending a penny. It doesn’t cost anything to optimise your title tags. Or to structure your articles in a way that’s optimised for Google and your readers.
You can hire someone to help with this of course. But a lot of SEO can be self-taught within an afternoon (okay, you might need a few afternoons for some topics!). And there are lots of free resources out there that make things super straightforward as well. Like LearningSEO.io, from Aleyda Solis. Or the Semrush blog.
4. SEO Can Provide Sustainable Growth
You can implement SEO strategies once and see benefits from them long into the future. This makes SEO a great substitute for paid ads.
With paid advertising, as soon as you stop paying, you typically stop seeing traffic. Even if you are paying for your SEO (such as with an SEO consultant), when you stop, any rankings you managed to get don’t (usually) suddenly disappear (as long as whoever you were paying does things properly!).
The best SEO strategies are of course ongoing. But my point is that the SEO tweaks and implementations you put in place can generate traffic long into the future. And that traffic is important because…
5. It Can Lead to More Sales
Every business needs to make money to survive. And sustainable traffic from SEO can help you do this.
Whether you make money from:
- Display ads
- Affiliate links
- Product sales
- Course signups
- Tool subscriptions
SEO can provide a steady stream of potential customers that you can turn into paying customers with high-quality content and (hopefully) real value.
SEO is not going to make you rich overnight. I’ll be honest, it can take years to really see the benefits of some strategies.
But a great SEO strategy can yield very lucrative benefits long into the future if you implement it properly.
But is SEO ever not important for a business?
When SEO Isn’t All That Important
Your Business Is Driven by Paid Ads
Paid advertising can be incredibly lucrative if you know what you’re doing. And if you are already seeing major success from paid advertising, on Google or elsewhere, then SEO may not be worth the investment right now.
If you’re already driving more leads or sales than you can handle, it’s probably not the best idea to overwhelm yourself further with learning and implementing SEO strategies.
However, paid ads and SEO are not mutually exclusive. In fact, you can run both strategies and see some incredible results.
Your paid ads can drive traffic to your site, potentially converting many visitors into paying customers. While your SEO strategies can help boost your brand awareness and overall visibility in search results, building customer trust and, hopefully, driving some traffic to your site as well.
With the goal of both strategies turning searchers into buyers.
Nobody Is Searching for What You’re Offering
Okay, it’s unlikely that nobody out there is looking for what you’re offering.
But if you operate in a super niche market, it can be difficult to justify the SEO investment if you’re only ever going to reach a very small pool of searchers. Instead, consider where your target audience may be most active, such as on social media platforms.
You Need Rapid Results
While SEO can offer sustainable results, it’s not known for being a quick solution to getting lots of traffic and/or customers. So if you’re planning a big product launch and don’t already have a good SEO strategy in place, turning to paid advertising or social media marketing can often be the better choice for getting lots of eyes on your content quickly.
It can take weeks, months, or even years to rank for target terms even with incredibly high-quality content. This isn’t going to cut it when you’re in a rush to make sales!
You Make Your Money on Other Platforms
If you sell products primarily through other platforms, like Etsy or Amazon for example, learning SEO (in terms of Google and other major search engines) may not be worth your time for now.
There are often SEO strategies you can implement on those particular platforms, but appearing in Google search may not be your top priority. SEO is only going to be worth it for most businesses if they operate primarily out of their own website. Or at least traffic to their website has the potential to be a major driver for revenue.
How to Implement a Solid SEO Strategy for Your Business
If you want to take a DIY approach to SEO, which you definitely can, you’ll need to brush up on a few key areas of understanding:
- Keyword research: So you know what search terms to target and what content to create
- SEO basics: We’re talking the absolute basics every website owner should know, from title tag optimisation to internal linking
- Technical SEO: This can be a bit tougher to learn, but it covers aspects of your site’s SEO that may not be visible to users, but can have a major impact on your rankings
- High-quality content: Providing helpful content is a must if you want to last long in the search results, so you need to understand what it looks like first
- Competitor analysis: Finally, you’re never alone in your SEO efforts, as your rivals are always trying to outrank you as well!
This can all get a bit overwhelming if you’re a total beginner and/or you just don’t have the time to devote to learning and implementing everything. That’s where hiring an SEO consultant can really help.
If you want to understand how to better optimise your website, check out my SEO audit service. This can give you a broad overview of your site’s current optimisation, and set out a roadmap for implementing a solid strategy going forward.
If you already have a lot of content on your site but aren’t seeing the results you need, my content audit service may be the better choice. This will help you understand where your content needs to improve, and you can apply guidance from one piece of content across your entire blog!