Why do I need SEO? Many small business owners wonder this. The answer is simple: people search all day, every day for billions of subjects. That’s right: Google processes 3.5 billion search queries each day.
When these Internet searches happen, SEO helps you to put your website in front of people. This is helpful for your business for two reasons.
Firstly, it gives you the opportunity to answer customers’ questions. Many people research products and services before they buy something; they want to know about quality, prices and various options. Customers also want to know how services or products will satisfy their needs before they spend their money.
Why don’t they get those answers from you?
By being present in the research phase, you will establish your company in your searcher’s mind, turning potential customers into real customers. Don’t miss out on that opportunity!
Secondly, by getting your product or service to show up first when customers search to buy, it helps to put your website in front of consumers in a much more organic and natural way.
Remember that 95% of people stay on page 1 of their Internet search: that’s a lot of money for businesses on page 1 and not a lot for everyone else. So when someone searches for a service or product you provide, your website needs to show up ahead of your competitors.
SEO is the purest form of direct marketing: people search and you are there to fill the need. No flashy ads or sales clichés: just your website, ready and waiting to serve your customers.
Hopefully you will have started to see how SEO can help your business. Unfortunately, simply having a website and selling great products or providing great services doesn’t guarantee that you will out-rank your competitors in search results. That’s why you need SEO: your website must be built to cater for the search engines, and your website must have a strong reputation online.
SEO helps your website to satisfy both of these requirements and helps to show search engines that you’re worth putting on page 1. A solid SEO strategy can take your website from being on page 100 to page 1, infinitely increasing your chances of being found by potential customers. Doing proper SEO will take consistent effort, continual monitoring and constant refining.
To conclude, SEO is for people who own a website and want their website to rank towards page 1 on Google, but who don’t want to spend a lot of money by paying for advertisements such as Pay Per Click or Ad Words.
