20 SEO Benefits to your Business - why you need to use SEO to help reach more people and gain new customers

The ultimate goal, besides new customers, is for your website to be the first one people see. When someone searches for a product or service you provide, you want them to see your company first.

The more people who visit your website, the more likely you will gain a new customer. Improving your website’s SEO can drive more and more customers to your site, increasing the changes of a sale.

Your website makes your brand accessible to the world, but without SEO they might never visit it. There is a huge audience out there waiting to find your website, and SEO can help you raise your brand awareness.

Because you have used SEO to promote your website using chosen keywords, the visitors who come to your site are more likely to be potential customers. They have searched for a particular thing, and found it on your website. Better SEO = higher conversion rate.

People trust Google, and use it every day to find what they are looking for. It’s estimated that 40% of internet clicks are on the top few listings. Better SEO means your site will rank higher in the search results, and will improve your credibility with potential customers.

This is one of the most important things SEO can do for you – make your website more visible, widening your audience.

Basic SEO is absolutely free if you have the skills to do it yourself, and is a much better alternative than pay-per-click or online advertising. You can hire someone to do the SEO for you, but even with paying someone to do the SEO on your site, it still has an excellent ROI in terms of how much more (and better) traffic your site will receive.

As important as it is to drive sales, it’s also important to know who your customers are. SEO analysis can show you where your visitors are from, which site they came to yours from, what keywords they searched for, which pages of your site they looked at, and much more. You can then use this information to create targeted keywords, or special offers targeted to those customers.

While you and your staff need to eat lunch, sleep and take holidays, your SEO doesn’t. it continues to drive traffic to your site. Your rankings do not disappear because you are busy doing other things, your website traffic continues to be generated. Once you start ranking highly, search engines will promote your website 247/365.

If somebody googles gardening services in Leeds, and that’s what you do, then you would want your website to appear in front of them. That is exactly what SEO is designed to do, put your website directly in front of your customers.

Your customers are using search engines to carry out research on products or services – looking at price comparisons or reviews online. High SEO rankings mean those people will see your company, helping them make informed decisions on the available options. If you don’t have good SEO, they won’t even see you when going through their decision making process.

I touched on the analytics of SEO above, in terms of who is visiting. SEO is highly measurable, and in this respect it’s infinitely better than paid advertising. SEO can show you how well your keywords work, suggest other keywords, measure the rate of conversions and visitors.

If you aren’t using SEO, your competitors will always appear above you, especially if they are using SEO. If your competitors are using it, then you certainly should be too.

If you are selling, or considering someday selling, your business, you definitely need to work on SEO first. The higher you rank in the search engines, the more value your business has.

If you have a newsletter signup form on your homepage, visitors being driven to your site are more likely to sign up to it, increasing the subscribers of your newsletter on a regular basis.

By using targeted traffic to drive the right kind of people to your site, you are continually going to give your customers what they need – improving their user experience each time.

It’s estimated that around 50% of internet searches are now carried out on mobile devices. Mobile is the future of online. By making your website mobile-friendly, search engines will favour your website for optimising your website for mobile searches.

It’s not just customers who use Google, jobseekers do also. Optimise your website for a particular role, avoid recruitment costs and hire the right person.

Whatever changes you make with your business, you can quickly and easily alter your SEO as you need to.

SEO is a long-term marketing process, and can take anywhere between 3 and 12 months to see real results. SEO is an ongoing process, and as seen above, can be used to supplement your marketing plan helping your business to grow and develop.

SEO is a vital part of marketing your website, designed specifically to drive traffic to your website by optimising your website with keywords or phrases relevant to your business.