With nearly 14 billion online searches every month and social media sites that rival populations of large countries, there’s unlimited opportunity. But to take advantage of that opportunity, it is vital to rank high in the search engines, to leverage social media e-mail, and to make sure your website turns visitors into leads and sales. If you don’t understand how to successfully apply these strategies, then your customers will go to your competitors instead.

What is SEO?

At a starting level, SEO means Search Engine Optimization. SEO is how search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! create the list of sites that are shown when someone types a word or phrase into the search bar. For instance, type in “computer” and the user will be presented with all sorts of websites describing what computers are, selling computers and components, listing uses for computers etc.

The search engine makes a determination as to what sites are relevant for the word(s) the user has typed in and in what order to list them. This determination is worked out by a hugely involved and complicated algorithm written into the search engine itself. So for the word “computer”, the search engine will first look at all the sites which it considers relevant to computers and then display them in an order that it will calculate, based on a series of things.

Having your company’s website be relevant to lots of words or phrases and making it as high up the list of displayed sites as is possible can be worth huge amounts of money in terms of increased site traffic and in return, increased customers. Websites and companies try to make themselves more relevant and higher up the search listings by optimizing their sites for the search engines; hence, Search Engine Optimization – SEO.

Why SEO?

Reliability. Banner ads or paid search engine placement work until the marketing budget depletes. Then, the site disappears from the listings, and your returning customers cannot find you any more (new visitors cannot find you either). SEO helps buffer this process, so you can gradually reduce the advertising budget as you’re increasing your results obtained from organic search engine listings. Also, consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results than from an evidently placed advertisement.

Brand awareness. A web site having a high ranking means more people see your brand and become familiar with your company and its products, even if they haven’t made a purchase. A surveys shows that consumers are twice as likely to recognize businesses ranked in the top three in search engine results than those appearing in banner ads.

Targeted traffic. Search engine optimization brings paying customers to your door step. The customers that find you through SEO are looking for your products/services as they have entered your websites keywords/phrases into the search engines. SEO will further help you transform visitors into buyers by analyzing their behavior once they find your site. You will learn how to transform these visitors into buyers by utilizing the content of your website in the most effective manner possible.

Affordability. In comparison to banner ads, which cost between $2500 to $35000 a month, SEO campaigns normally start at $500.

The Benefits of SEO

The many benefits of a well executed SEO campaign are free of any risk and can only create positive results for your company or business.

SEO will offer:

• Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
• Fixed Costs
• Brand Visibility
• Repeat Business
• Customer Acquisition – Targeted Prospects
• Focus on Unique Content
• Credibility / Brand Perception
• Findability

Cost-effective Customer Acquisition. There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (eg. “Insurance”, “Cars”, etc…).

Fixed Costs. The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time, after initial optimization costs and lower ongoing optimization costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.

Brand Visibility. Think about that local search on  ‘Insurance”. The big companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it would then need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.

Repeat Business. Studies show that customers referred from search engines tend to stick around longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!

Focus on Unique Content. We are big believers in original, quality content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorize and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this. Remember that quality content attracts quality links. And that links are still very important for SEO. So if you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.

Credibility / Brand Perception. “Why aren’t you in Google”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?

Find-ability. Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product, a person, etc…