For business owners like yourself, looking to be found in the ultra-competitive niche that you are in, search engine optimization or SEO is the best way of taking the fight to the big boys. No longer are you going to be shoved around in this digital marketing place, but the time to fight is now. In this article, we will give you an overview of why SEO is essential to gain a foothold and start winning in business online.
The importance of SEO has been a point of debate for several years. For every guru that believes SEO is dead, we can give you two reasons, that will say that it is not. There is plenty of information available online to manipulate the rankings in one way or the other, but one factor is constant, and that is SEO. SEO usage is on an ever-increasing rise. The popularity is immense, and the results can be game-changing.
Importance of SEO for Business
SEO is the process of helping your website to appear in the results of search engines like Google. SEO requires the knowledge of the ever-changing search engine algorithms, which can be confusing, to say the least. Because of this, most people have very little understanding of what it takes to rank highly in these search engines. Search engines are not really candid when it comes to algorithm updates, which makes website SEO challenging as it often requires a constant update.
So, is all of the effort worth it? Is the time spent researching keywords, carefully placing them in title tags, headers, and meta descriptions and creating great content really worth the results? And is SEO still relevant now that so many marketers seem to be focusing solely on content? In a word, YES!
People use the internet and enter millions of keywords daily. The internet has become the number one method for consumers to get answers to their everyday questions. Since past couple of years, the place where the majority of consumers spend at least some of their time every day is The Internet. So, you have to excel at SEO, meeting your customers' needs in the place where they spend most of their time.
Benefits of SEO
More than 80% of consumers of businesses search over the internet before buying products and services. They search the keywords in search engines and get a list of relevant websites in return. People visit websites which are top in the search results because they appear more relevant to that search query. The issues if your website is not on the top of the search results is that it becomes difficult to reach your customers online. Websites on page 1 get 95% of all traffic compared to page two and three.
If you think why your competitor ranks higher than you, the reason is SEO. SEO, when appropriately applied, helps rank your website higher than your competitor website in response to specific keyword search. When you page rank higher, it gets more people to find you. If you want to rank higher, then you need to put all the ingredients the search engine is looking for in your web design.
It includes website architecture, HTML tags, text content, visual content, inbound, and outbound links. If you know how websites operate, you may be able to understand the sumptuous benefits of SEO. In the digital environment today, competitiveness is the key. So, how can you connect with the users who can potentially become your customers? The best way is with SEO. Even though it requires time and energy, it's worth doing.
Components that Affect User's Search
Where the customers begin their journey? Yep, you guessed it, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When the user types in a question, they are rewarded with an endless selection of websites specifically designed to answer their query. Three major components affect the information that a user sees in their customized search results.
Location
When searching for information, search engines track location of the user performing the search. This can be a GPS connection on a cell phone or as simple as the IP address on your personal computer. This is especially impactful if the user inserts the location for his search term. For example, Dentist, Las Vegas. This is going to provide hyper-local results that give the user with information on the best places to get their teeth taken care of in Las Vegas.
Personal Search History
This is one of the things that you, as a business owner, can't really impact. However, Google has done an incredible job of tracking how internet users find and interact with the information available to them on the web. You would likely notice that as you search for things on the web, personalized advertisements pop up on the websites that you visit. For example, yesterday you may have been searching for a Coleman grill and today while scrolling through cat photos on Facebook, your newsfeed probably is interrupted by an ad alerting you for a once-in-a-lifetime deal for a top-of-the-line golden grill at Sears. Coincidence? I think not!
SEO Performed by Companies
After you make your way to the results of the pages of Google, Bing or Yahoo, the information that is laid out in front of you is the result of an incredibly competitive sport known as SEO. In a nutshell, companies are competing for your attention in every way known to man, and you get a front-row seat to the Super-Bowl that is page 1. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are fiercely competitive. They want to earn your search loyalty, and if a website is failing to deliver relevant and easy-to-read answers to the questions that are being typed into the search box, they won't do business with that website in the future. They want the customers to get the information they need quickly, so they'll keep searching with their site.
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