Olly Stephens - Appshack Ninja
7 de jul. de 2018
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the techniques and practices followed in order to increase website traffic and interaction through organic search engine results.
The general goal is appearing as high as possible in the search rankings based on a users search keywords. It is arguably the most important part of digital marketing on the modern web. Nowadays, unless you appear in the first page of Google’s search results, you are extremely unlikely to gain any significant traffic, and your competitors will undoubtedly capitalize on this. DON’T get left behind!
Here are our top 10 reasons why SEO should be YOUR company’s top priority in 2018:
1. Traffic
Why invest in a beautiful website for your business, or spend a long time making one yourself, if hardly anyone can find it? Your primary goal, above all others when marketing your brand online, is to generate traffic, and KEEP generating. Maintaining a consistent growth of both new and returning visitors can be challenging, but a first-page Google search result is the equivalent of a full-size billboard in Times Square. Let users FIND your site more easily, and make it easy for visitors to share pages and content from your site, generating valuable backlinks from external sites.
2. Credibility
People are more likely to be trusting of a Google search result which appears higher in the rankings when searching for specific keywords. This is natural human behaviour, and can be compared with the typically larger advertisements you would normally find in the classified section of a magazine.
3. Cost effective
Structuring a website specifically for SEO, along with frequent, rich new content generation, is far less expensive than other forms of online advertising such as Social media campaigns or Pay Per Click.
4. Your competition are probably already doing it
Be prepared to fall short compared to your competitors if you haven’t already thought about an SEO strategy. Your rivals are likely to have already thought hard and invested in SEO services. The last thing you want it to lose a potential client simply because your competitors are ranked higher than you on Google. Don’t get left behind!
5. Insights
The power of services such as Google’s Analytics reporting and Search Console have allowed SEO specialists to delve deeper into the habits of their site’s users, and gain a deeper understanding of how, when and where users are browsing the site from. Developers such as Appshack have built upon these services in order to centralise your website’s Analytics and statistics, visualising the data in a friendly, insightful manner.
6. Brand identity
Your brand is your business. It defines it without explanation (hopefully), and the web is the perfect place to promote it to the world. A strong SEO website, with regularly-updated content, media and user interaction, is far more likely to become a well-known name, and make its mark among the competition.
7. Rise of mobile
Bandwidth and overall traffic to mobile devices has overtaken that of traditional desktops in the last few years. This has opened up many new strategies and techniques to maximise the power of SEO on mobile browsers. It is vitally important to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, or else risk plummeting out of the first page of search results.
8. Content is King
Regularly adding new content to a website, when done efficiently and correctly, can be a very cheap yet powerful way of increasing the SEO of your website. As Google regularly crawls and indexes your site, new content will help match keywords entered by users searching Google, to new content on your website.
9. Social media revolution
Social media is everywhere. Almost everybody checks their phone a few times a day to trawl through the mountain of posts, articles and photos on their Facebook or Twitter feeds. Why not be a part of that mountain? With Graph tagging, it is now easier than ever to share a page from your website onto any popular social media platform, and watch your traffic grow!
10. It’s not going anywhere
Judging by the seemingly never ending growth of the web, continuous improvement of search engines and the way they crawl websites and rank search results, it is safe to assume that an investment in SEO will not become a dead duck any time in the future. Why wait?