SEO and Its Importance

Today’s digital ecosystem has grown rapidly in recent years and has resulted in the majority of businesses and brands seeking asylum online in hopes of similar growth.

With the rise of social media, digital marketing, and search engines, and considering the value that these outlets provide to businesses and brands alike, it’s important for those interested to take a deeper look at what’s required to reap the benefits.

One of these outlets? SEO.

SEO is an all-but-necessary marketing tactic that many implement across digital strategies. Some, in fact, would argue that it is a necessity in today’s digital world. With that being said, in this article, we’ll be discussing what SEO is, why it’s important, and why you should be implementing it within your digital marketing strategy.

What you’ll come to learn is that SEO is an incredible, largely organic strategy that can help your business gain traffic, increase conversions, build industry authority, and ultimately grow your business.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym used in marketing that depicts Search Engine Optimization. As a largely organic marketing tactic, SEO can also involve paid avenues in order to increase page rankings and otherwise.

Although SEO is used for several reasons and in many different capacities, its primary function is to increase web traffic, capture new leads, and build a larger audience through targeting keywords, improving SEO scores, and ranking atop search engine results.

While SEO can be implemented across platforms and search engines, two of the most common are Google and YouTube, with Google comprising over 90% of total online search volume today.

How does it work, you ask?

Because the search engine algorithm is constantly changing, it’s difficult to suggest one definitive way that SEO operates. With that said, there are several strategies that you can and should implement so to optimize your efforts for reach, visibility, and authority.

Some of the most common and effective Search Engine Optimization strategies include publishing relevant content across platforms, publishing high-quality content across platforms, using relevant keywords without keyword stuffing, blogging, link building, and other more sophisticated technical SEO practices such as optimizing website speed and load time.

For a more comprehensive interpretation of what the most popular search engines look for, consider visiting Google’s workspace database where they go into detail about how Google Search works and what it uses as key indicators.

To illustrate how comprehensive Google’s algorithm is when ranking websites and pages, it’s important to note that it uses web crawlers in order to scan the entirety of what it’s examining. Based on a total of 210 factors (yes, 210…), it determines website rankings.

All 210 factors fall under one of five categories, inclusive of ‘Meaning of Query’, ‘Relevance of Webpages’, ‘Usability of Webpages’, ‘Quality of Content’, and Context & Settings’. The most useful factors to focus on from an overview standpoint include content value, website functionality, and linking authority.

The Importance of SEO

At its most basic, SEO is important because it makes your business visible to more eyes. This, for obvious reasons, is beneficial because it increases industry authority, thus traffic, and ultimately results in higher conversion rates and greater opportunities.

Withstanding its benefits regarding total ROI, optimizing for search also helps build brand awareness, gain new business prospects, improve authority in your respective industry, ultimately positioning your business or brand as a leader in the space.

In order to survive in today’s competitive online landscape, it’s imperative that your business remains relevant. One of the best ways to ensure relevancy? You guessed it… SEO.

By increasing total web traffic, gaining authority in your industry, increasing conversions, and getting an edge on your competitors, you ultimately increase sales, experiencing untapped growth as a result.

Good luck!