The SEO industry is being frowned upon by a lot of small business owners due to the fact that most of the time, the process is very difficult to understand. Not to mention that the things SEO practitioners does most of the time, does not make sense, at least immediately.

The confusion brought in a lot of false information too. Most business owners do not have a full grasp of SEO, the very reason why a lot were scammed by unscrupulous SEO specialists.

But even if SEO is difficult to grasp, doesn’t mean that you will just ignore it for your business. In fact, all businesses should try to learn it then decide whether they are ready to take the plunge either by hiring agencies, freelancers or an in-house SEO guy.

Before you take the plunge, here is our list of reasons why SEO is an absolute must for your business.

Organic search traffic is the most cost effective and highly converting traffic

You might not know it but your website might have been visited by people through search engines such as Google. Most of our clients don’t realize this until we point out in their Google Analytics accounts how many people are visiting their website through search engine referrals.

And most of the time, when you compare the conversion rates of the different traffic sources, organic search traffic always have the highest conversion rate of them all. Why is that?

It is far more convincing to people when they seek information themselves versus forcefully showing them the information that they might not need at the moment. When your website is optimized for the right keyword, you will only appear if someone searches for your target keywords. This way, you are not really distracting people on their research online, but complimenting them by showing information highly relevant to their query.

This is the reason why organic SEO traffic converts well.

SEO is also cost effective as you are not spending directly on gaining those organic traffic. Sure you spend money on paying an SEO specialist to do the work, but once your website is optimized for organic search and is ranking on important keywords, it will stick there for a long time. Thus giving you results months after or even years ahead.

SEO is one of the best ways to promote your brand

If you are planning to position your brand in your industry, you better have a good story about your business or product. And the best way to promote your brand and story is SEO.

For example, if your business is into selling stylish and classic men’s shoes, try to create a good story about your brand. Then create resources and articles, either inside your website or on vertical websites in your industry on topics around classic and stylish men’s shoes.

These contents, together with other best SEO practices, will be able to position your business online to rank well on organic searches very much related to your business, eventually giving you high rankings as you go along creating more high quality content.

When you have a lot of ranking web pages related to your business and product, more and more people will be aware of your business. And if you have created high quality content that has a lot of value to your target market, your brand will be known eventually.

One good example of branding through SEO is the case of Nike golf, which you can find in this article.  Nike Golf was able to gain 348% increase on search traffic from 2010 to 2012, using SEO.

SEO is also about user experience

Do you know that Google can track if someone clicks your link in their search results and immediately bounced back to searching again in Google? When there are a lot of people exiting from your website the moment they land in on one of your pages, it must be that your website does not give them the best experience.

Though there is an exception to this when your web page’s purpose is to just show a quick information for your target people. E.g., you might have a website that shows a local time to a specific time zone. People visiting your website will quickly leave the moment they know the local time they are looking for but you still were able to provide the value they are looking for.

So bounce rate is not necessarily all bad but most of the websites having high bounce rates have very poor user experience.

Another clue that search engines use to determine the user experience on your website is the pogo-sticking effect. It actually supports the bounce rate metric for search engines to determine the usefulness of your website.

Pogo-sticking effect happens when people searching in search engines and clicked your website, immediately left but returned to the search results right away and started clicking the other websites in it.

This is a clearer sign that your website did not provide value to that user. Your website may not be relevant to the user’s query, which eventually search engines will remove you in that search result or the information you have presented in that web page has a very poor quality.

Knowing bounce rates and the pogo-sticking effect and their impact on your website’s presence in search engines will help you design your websites with user experience in mind. Which eventually help you gain more customers in the long run if you abide on sound SEO practices.

SEO can influence the sales funnel

Creating high quality content has long been considered in SEO as one of the best way to gain more search traffic. Search engines such as Google also always reward good content with more rankings on their search results.

When you have a lot of visible content especially if you are giving tips and providing value, you will have a good chance of influencing potential buyers to have a bias on your products/services.

One good example was the Lenovo’s content marketing initiative. The goal is to create content targeted towards building awareness and improving trust to their products. They have created a site called Tech Revolution to house their content for this campaign.

The result was highly successful. The micro site gained 34 million impressions and 1.7 million new web users! Not bad for a 250 articles they have written for this content marketing initiative.

They were also able to attribute at least $300 million in sales to this initiative alone. More info about this case study here.

• The cost-effectiveness of SEO
• Helpful in connecting your business with resource people, vertical businesses and your industry communities