SEO is extremely crucial for almost every business in this digital era. You might have heard this a lot, but not yet knowing why in detail, right? It’s definitely a strong marketing tool, but let us give you a glimpse of why businesses should use it as soon as possible. Nearly 81% of retail customers and 94% of B2B buyers claim to perform online searches before purchase. So if your brand doesn’t have a solid presence online, you’re definitely falling behind many others. 

Many elements make up a great SEO strategy, and business owners need to understand what they’re dealing with. Not only to understand what SEO is but what impact could it made are the information that you must have in your hands. In short, SEO can make your website and brand more visible to the public, building relationships with customers, and have many more benefits. Let’s stop all the wait, here are everything you should know about SEO in the digital world! 

What is SEO?

SEO is the acronym of “Search Engine Optimization” – meaning the practice to increase your website traffic. SEO tactics can be performed both paid and non-paid (organic), so there is quite a lot to do with this incredible marketing tool. Don’t think SEO is all about the technical things, most of the time with SEO, you’ll have to take care of your audiences first. 

SEO, in fact, is understanding what and how people are searching for online. It’s all about knowing the question and answers to customers' problems, then creating content that attracts people. It’s meticulous progress of understanding both the people’s mind and the systems practice. If you’re doing it well enough, you will eventually create a good connection with your potential customers to convince them to buy from you. 

An SEO strategy will consist of both on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO means you create content that includes high-value keywords and optimize it to match the requirements of the search engine. Here you’ll have to pay close attention to title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, URL, and keyword placement. 

Off-page SEO is exactly like its name, which means you have to link your content to other content on and off your website. It’s also called backlink to drive traffic and increase rankings. Off-page SEO can be achieved by promoting your webpage content on other communication platforms. 

Get to know the importance of SEO for business

If you haven’t known, SEO is probably the only online marketing channel that pays its dividends over time. With the right setup, a piece of content can snowball and attract greater traffic over time. Meanwhile, with advertising, you’ll have to fund your budget accordingly to maintain the results. 

Moreover, businesses of all markets are craving online customers’ attention, and they’ll do all the best ways to boost their results instantly. This means spending millions on advertising. However, if you opt for a much solid, long-term solution, then SEO is definitely your thing. Almost half of retailers confirmed that customers like to research online, even if they do end up buying in a store. Therefore, brands need to pay attention to SEO to ensure their visibility and so much more. 

Visibility and Rankings

One of the most obvious functions of SEO is to boost visibility and online exposure. By making it much simpler and easier for customers to find your business online, you’re enhancing your chance of creating more profits. More people find your website online also lead to a higher ranking on a SERP. And do you know that more than 25% of web users never even scroll past the first SERP? One leads to another, and a good SEO effort could bring you so many potential customers. 

Web Traffic

Visibility is closely related to website traffic, it’s also one of the key goals for SEO. Your traffic will increase once your ranking and visibility got higher. So if you want the desired amount of visitors flocking to your site, you’ll have to do SEO. Thus, the ideal rankings to aim at is the top 5 position since 75% of the clicks go here first. Definitely no pressure here, but the sooner you start working on SEO for your website, the better. And keep in mind that SEO is a long journey, so don’t expect overnight results.

Authority

This is quite a new concept in SEO, but many are focusing on it due to its importance to search engines. Having authority means your website is trustworthy, provides quality content, and is relevant to what users are looking for. The more authority your web page has, the higher your ranking and the more traffic it could attract. When we said SEO is a journey, we really mean it since everything is connected and affected each other. 

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Creating a Better Visitor Experience

This is one of the reasons why we said SEO is not all about technical things. Great SEO practice will improve the usability of your website, creating a much better users experience. Wondering why? To achieve great SEO ranking, you’ll need good content that meets all the requirements, then responsive design, loading speed, and many other features. Once you made all of it, you’re eventually improve the overall experience of users, allow them to visit from any browser at any time. Can you see the connection? The more visitors satisfy with your website experience, the bigger chance they will choose your brand over other competitors.

Growth

At the end of the day, every marketing effort must lead to greater growth, and obviously, revenues. This is one of the main reasons why SEO is essential for all businesses. Since it helps improve customers' experience, increase trust and drive more potential customers to your site, it’ll benefit your conversion rate. This means making more sales, having more customers, and visible growth to your business. 

SEO is Constantly Improving and Best Practices are Always Being Updated

As above, we’ve stated that SEO is the only channel that can pay dividends over time. There are precise ways to achieve SEO goals. However, as the digital worlds evolve every day, you must always keep your site up to date. Googles and other search engines also improve their algorithm on a yearly, even monthly basis. So if we’re not proactive with changes, your brand will fall behind too far to come back. 

The main goal of SEO is to keep your business in the competition. And if the competition requires regular updates, you’ll have to keep up with it for the best results. 

SEO is Relatively Cheap and Very Cost-Effective

Of course, it will cost you some money! But once you look at the bigger picture, isn’t everything need investment at first? SEO, especially long-term SEO targeting is absolutely inexpensive at all, and it will pay you off. Other marketing efforts could be the cost, but this is the real deal investment for your business. And trust us, it will only get better, just like any investment equity in life. 

SEO Brings New Opportunities to Light

SEO allows the business to attract potential customers more effectively at a lower cost than any other marketing tool. It will leverage new opportunities to your brand, whether it’s an email subscription or a purchase order. By offering high-quality SEO, you’re giving people chances to discover and explore your brand at their most convenient. SEO is actually a give-and-take relationship. You give out your content, graphics, and effort, to receive sales, new customers, and everything needed for business growth.

SEO is Always Going to Be Here

Consumers will always want products and services online, and brands will always look for the most cost-effective way to do that. Although the role and strategy for SEO might change over time, it’ll always be available online. By being around for years, nowadays SEO is creating the foundation for the future of the digital world, also the future of your business. SEO effort won’t disappear, it just getting bigger and better through time! 

Next-generation search engines are predicted to be powered by deep neural networks and machine learning and will explode in market value, from $14.9 billion in 2019 to $55.7 billion in 2025. 

The Crucial Elements of SEO

We’ve already met all the reasons why SEO is so crucial to businesses. Now it’s time to get to know all the essential elements of a good SEO strategy so that you can begin as soon as possible. 

Keywords

Keywords were no longer the only SEO technique that mattered, but that doesn't mean they're not crucial when it comes to SEO. The main difference is that keywords today need to be well researched, carefully chosen. Then it should be used wisely in your content to be effective. Keywords are words and phrases that potential customers use to find content online (which is literally anything they want). Brands can also use keywords to connect with potential customers.

When searching for keywords, it is important to focus on ones with high search rates, low competition. Remember to have a good combination of short-tail keywords long-tail keywords and local keywords. You can also use keywords to modify all your headings, URLs, and other SEO elements on the page.

Content

Content is an important part of SEO, as it is how you reach and engage your audience. For example, if you own a plant nursery and want to increase your visibility, there are several blogs you can post about gardening, choosing the right types of plants, growing tips, and more.  By then, if a potential customer wanted to buy a plant, you would be the first nursery that comes to mind.

Today's content should be instructive, but also interesting, relevant, engaging, and shareable. Content comes in various forms, including:

•      Web page content
•      Videos
•      Blogs
•      Infographics
•      Podcasts
•      Whitepapers and e-books
•      Social media posts
•      Local Listings

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO includes external optimization practices that take place outside of your website rather than on your website. The most important technique for off-page SEO is creating backlinks, as high-quality backlinks to your website from external websites tell search engines that your website is valuable and of high quality and this generates authority. 

When it comes to creating backlinks, there is a wide variety of methods. And some of the best tactics include blogging guests, widely shared infographics, and mentioning influencers in content. Of course, there are few other practices, but we’ve tested and seen the impacts.

Local SEO 

As more and more people use mobile devices to search, it’s impossible to deny the importance of local SEO. As you can see, nearly 57% of all searches are on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. Users are really engaging in local intent and it’s normal to search for things at a specific location. Additionally, besides local keywords, businesses can claim directory listings, creating location-specific pages for your website. Don’t forget to create pages for your business on Google Maps, this will make it much easier for people to find you.

Search Engine Marketing 

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to paid marketing activities. It includes native ads, Google AdWords, social media ads, Pay-per-click, Google shopping ads, display ads, and more. 

 While SEM is generally not an important part of a comprehensive SEO strategy, it has its place because it can help you reach new and very specific audiences.

Final thoughts 

As you can see, SEO is a complex endeavor that involves many different techniques, tactics, and best practices. Additionally, these best practices continue to evolve as consumer and web user behavior changes, new technologies emerge, and search engines change their algorithms. That said, SEO is still of the utmost importance to any business that wants to be visible online, so your efforts are worth it. 

 SEO can help a business achieve several goals, including brand awareness, traffic, conversions, customer experience, and much more. This is why it is so important for digital marketers to have a solid understanding of what SEO is. how you can help achieve the goals and what are the latest best practices.