SEO might be a mystery for a lot of website and business owners. However, there are few facts that you should know to understand the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO).
1. Every month, over 130 billion searches are conducted online.
This number represents the enormous potential of a well-structured SEO ready website. If your website is search engine optimised and you continue to add keyword researched content on a consistent basis, your chances of growing your business online are limitless!
2. According to search engine journal, more than 80% of businesses that operate online, state that their blogs are the most important asset.
Having a business blog is a great way of increasing your traffic through posting SEO friendly & informative articles. By doing so, you allow potential customers to find you easily. If your blog posts and articles are accurate and informative and if you or your SEO specialist have performed extensive keyword research, it won’t take long before your traffic starts increasing.
3. Businesses with a blog get 434% more pages indexed than those without.
The importance of having a business blog mentioned above reflects this fact. To understand the reason behind this, let’s take a step back. Blogs are a major source of content. Content has to be relevant and informative, with new articles published at least once a week. Google sees how often and how relevant your content is, and it assigns your site a “site crawl budget”. The more active the site, the larger the crawl budget allocated. This means it will index your site more frequently and with more depth, increasing your number of indexed pages and therefore the number of opportunities to rank for many combinations of keywords in the search engines. At the end of the day, if your pages cannot be indexed, then you will not get search engine traffic.
Another big problem most business owners face is a lack of time to write fresh content on a consistent basis along with inexperience performing keyword research, meaning writing content around keywords/topics that are too competitive to rank on Google page 1.
4. Almost 90% people using the internet will usually reach a business via mobile while doing a local search.
This is the main reason not to forget to make your website suitable for mobile devices. Imagine potential customers in your local vicinity using their smartphones to look for the products or services that you specialise in, and being able to click on a prominent “call now” button? Of course, it would, and that’s why businesses that have adapted to this mobile revolution are growing and succeeding. If you think that your website is not fully mobile optimised, you can contact us for a free consultation.
5. On-page SEO and Off-Page SEO are both very important ranking factors.
While On-page SEO could be fixed quite quickly (depending on the website size) off-page SEO, requires more time and it needs a good long term plan. When we talk about off-page SEO, we mean mainly building your backlink profile, which can be tricky and very complicated. Be careful of so called experts who try to sell a dodgy link building package and remember that black hat backlinks can penalise your website and caused years of good work to vanish overnight. Please contact us if you need a full backlink analysis of your website or you require more information about off-page SEO.
6. Google seems to own 65 to 70% of search engine market share.
This means that a good ranking in google will boost your sales. Google regularly updates its algorithms to guarantee the most accurate relevancy of results. Following Google best practice rules, avoiding dodgy shortcuts (such as black hat backlinks), being consistent in your content production will reward you in the end.
7. 75% of users do not reach page 2 of search engine results.
According to HubSpot, only 25% of search engine users reach the second results page, which means that if you are ranking on position 11+, you are missing visitors and conversions. Getting a higher position on search engine not only will increase your traffic, but it will be a direct result of your trust factor growth. Ranking higher in Google involves working on on-page/off-page SEO, keywords & content and of course competitors’ analysis. These are only a few of the aspects that you need to implement, that’s why there are SEO specialists out there ready to help.
8. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as cold calling, direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.
This makes sense as an SEO lead finds you while searching for an answer to their problem, therefore has an urgency to fix the issue. While performing outbound lead generation, you usually have to educate the potential customer first, before a sale can occur, which leads to lower close rate as well as longer sales cycle.
9. 50% of search queries are four words or longer.
This means that you must base more of your content around long tail keywords. Not only are long tail keywords searched more near the end of the research/buying cycle but they are also easier to rank on page 1 of Google.
10. Only 20% of search engines users click on a paid advert, while 80% focus on organic search.
Even though paid advertisement is an excellent resource for increasing brand awareness, traffic and sales, it cannot even be compared to organic searches. If your website is not search-engine optimised you will find yourself spending a lot of time and money on paid advertisement, while you could getter better results for free, by planning and implementing a long term SEO strategy.
Feel free to contact us for a free SEO analysis of your website. We’re here to help!
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