Why is SEO important? 

SEO or Search engine optimisation is vital for any size of business that wants their website to succeed online but you might be asking why? Why should I invest money in something I can’t see immediate results from?

You might be saying something along the lines of…

“I’ve already invested money in a website and someone runs a social media platform for me so that’ll be enough.”

Well, unfortunately, it’s not if you want to grow online or make the most of the potential of your online ability. An effective SEO campaign could result in anything from an extra 5-10% of sales to tripling your business’ performance over a few years.

SEO in action

Let’s use the example of an organisation that has just lost an employee to maternity or another company has headhunted their employee. The work this employee did is vital to their company and they need an experienced replacement ASAP! So they look for a recruitment company on Google. In this example, you have a recruitment company but your website has no SEO optimisation.

Step 1) They search on google for recruitment companies – whether it’s ‘fast candidate recruiters’ or ‘recruitment office near me’ etc.

Step 2) They scan up and down the 1st page for the best looking relevant recruitment office that can do the job for them. Remember time is of the essence – as are most searches.

Step 3) They contact someone likely in the top 3-5 search results. 

Your website isn’t SEO optimised but your competitors are. Not being prepared has cost your company work. Now imagine how many times per day that occurs for companies near you, in the same country as you.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you looked past the first page for a company? Doing this might answer your own question of why is SEO important.

So what can you do to improve this? 

You can invest in or learn how to effectively use white hat SEO, order an SEO site audit to identify the problems currently dragging down your websites rankings. If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, you can learn how to use SEO effectively and use the tools necessary such as Google Analytics to monitor the performance of your efforts.

If you don’t have the time to learn SEO & implement ( it is a full-time job ) – Choose wisely when selecting an SEO specialist or agency for your website optimisation efforts as if you choose poorly, you could end up costing your business more than just a failed investment but also damage or worse blacklist your website off search engine rankings if the SEO ‘expert’ uses black hat SEO methods.

Growing organic traffic is vital to any business online regardless of size unless you want to buy your potential customers with Adwords/ Facebook advertising.

Your competitors are likely already using SEO as we’re in 2018 and by not doing so, you’re not giving your business a chance to compete. If however, your competitors are not using SEO, then that’s all the more reason to use SEO and jump ahead of your competitors.

If you want more on SEO then follow @creativewl on twitter for a live feed of these articles as they’re released.