Why SEO Matters to YOU

You want your website to be found… but at what price? PPC advertisements and paid keywords can cost anywhere from a few bucks to a whopping $150 per click! Those rates can be budget-blowing to any organization if a person clicks, and clicks, and clicks and then leaves your site without making a purchase or taking an action. This is why search engine optimization (or “SEO”) matters. SEO is critical for receiving those quality organic clicks — without the additional cost.

What’s the difference between organic and paid? For the most part, organic searches are closely related to a user’s query based on relevance (determined through SEO and various other factors). Compare that to search engine marketing (“SEM”), which is promotion through online advertising.

SEO helps in myriad ways. Optimizing your site’s SEO can increase your efforts to better reach your target audience. It can also help you climb above your competitors. With organic placement, you bring in customers by proving to the search engine algorithms that your site has relevant content and authority on keywords. It’s more valuable to own your destiny through SEO than relying on a third party for paid search.

Here are some interesting facts about organic searches and SEO:

• Organic SEO is about five times better than paid search ads. (New Media Campaigns, 2018)
• One in 10 blog posts are compounding, meaning organic search increases their traffic over time. (HubSpot, 2016)
• Up to 80 percent of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results. (MarTech, 2018)
• About 60 percent of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. (HubSpot, 2018)

Plus, SEO is an evergreen solution. Increasing organic traffic through SEO is a much more sustainable model for your strategic plan than paying for each visitor. Through optimizing SEO, you begin to speak to the visitors you’re most interested in engaging with, not the search engine bots.

New content helps accomplish this. And, not just any content, but content that is authentic to you and your business. Fresh content keeps your SEO and website relevant through blogs, new pages, white papers, videos, etc. It’s no longer acceptable to stuff content with keywords for the sake of search engines — this keyword stuffing was quite common before Google cracked down on abusers. Good SEO practice is about adding more organic search-ability with keywords significant to you.

With strategic SEO, you can tap into the perceived benefits to appearing in an organic search — especially on page one. That ranking suggests to users that you’re an authority and leader in the area. It gives you credibility. Your brand gets in front of consumers, which leads to more click-through and potentially more leads.

Everyone’s dream is to spend $0 on advertising their website. But when it comes to being found online, there needs to be a compromise. (Remember, free advertising is only a dream.) A reasonable plan includes balancing SEM spend and bringing traffic in through SEO, which is instrumental to organic searches.

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