Do you run a business that relies on its website and online presence to engage with customers, generate conversions, and increase and improve its brand reach?
Well, there’s a good chance you do and there’s a good reason why more businesses are turning to local digital agencies for impactful and effective SEO campaigns: in fact, it’s predicted that by 2021, the value of the ecommerce industry is expected to reach a whopping $4.5 trillion in value.
As time goes on, customer behaviour is changing as well. We live in an age of global freedom of information, and today an amazing 81% of B2C buyers and 94% of B2B buyers go online to search and research what they’re looking for before committing to a purchase.
As such, brands who have failed to keep up to online standards have fallen by the wayside. But how do you make sure that remain visible and a contender amongst literally millions of other websites online? SEO can help with that.
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of optimising your website and online presence for maximum visibility on search engine results pages (or SERPs, for short).
Did you know that there are 40,000 searches made through Google every day, adding up to 3.5 billion each day? As award-winning Manchester SEO and digital marketing agency Embryo Digital say: “SEO is becoming a more and more important part of how businesses market themselves online, because a good SEO campaign is all about raising your visibility and optimising your online presence so that you offer both Google and your users a better experience – something that Google rewards with greater results page ranking, which leads to increased relevant traffic and greater numbers of engaged users coming onto your website.”
If you’re in a competitive market and are struggling to gain a lot of attention or traffic online, it’s probably got a lot to do with the optimisation of your website and other online platforms.
Your offer might be just as good as (or even better) than your competitors, but if Google isn’t rewarding your site with visibility because it’s cluttered, difficult to navigate, and confusing for Google to understand, then you’re going to miss out on a big slice of organic traffic that you probably deserve.
But how exactly does it work? Well, there are a lot of things that go into creating a successful SEO campaign, and some of it is quite technical.
From link building and on-page optimisation, keyword research, conversion rate optimisation, or populating your site with long form, optimised and creative content, there are a lot of different ways that an experienced SEO might tackle your campaign.
There’s a lot to consider, and optimising your site can be a slow process to begin with, taking months to see visible and noteworthy results, but within 6-12 months of committing to your campaign, you’ll begin to benefit from improvements that can last for years to come.
SEO sometimes gets criticism because of its supposed ‘flakiness’ – after all, it’s true that Google never lets all the secrets of its algorithms become public knowledge – a lot of SEOs use testing to figure out what has an affect on how the algorithms assess your ranking and make informed decisions that way.
But it’s also true that every good SEO worth their salt knows that Google’s core aim is to serve its users with the highest quality content and the best user experiences available – if you can optimise and improve the quality of your site by creating a better user experience, you will always be in Google’s favour.
And with it, a good SEO campaign brings better ROI than traditional marketing practices such as television, radio and print ads, while returning a better value for money than a lot of paid search marketing campaigns.
If you’re not already paying attention to your search engine optimisation, now is the time to start!