Why do you need to have SEO as part of your marketing mix?

The value of SEO cannot be overstated if you’re searching for a means to grow your audience, increase traffic to your website, and boost your lead generation in a way that builds over time.

One of the best investments you can make in your marketing efforts overall, let alone your digital marketing, is SEO, or search engine optimization.

Nonetheless, if you’re unsure of how to carry out SEO properly or are having difficulties generating real leads from your SEO efforts, keep reading. In this piece, I explain why SEO matters so much for the success of your business and why you should invest more in SEO, especially in 2022. 

SEO Is an Effective Way to Connect with Your Target Audience

The greatest marketing plan for reaching your target audience is probably SEO. It enables your brand and its audience to interact more naturally. You make a connection with them right when they are considering an issue, challenge, or goal. The most straightforward and logical path from their interests to your solutions is that one. That makes it possible for your marketing to actually benefit your audience.

Also, SEO offers vital audience information that can be leveraged to expand the firm. Also, the procedure for gathering data is painless and unobtrusive.

This is especially crucial in light of the often intrusive manner in which many marketers approach audiences. Consumers grow weary of advertisements that obstruct their social media use, spammy content, unsolicited emails, pop-ups, advertisements that appear before and during films they are attempting to view, etc.

With effective SEO, you can connect with both current and potential clients by creating helpful content. Because you aren’t attempting to persuade people to pause what they are doing and visit your website, it is sincere. Instead, you give them pertinent, useful information when they are most interested in learning about it.

Organic Search is Often the Primary Source of Traffic

The fact that SEO is frequently the main source of website traffic is one of the main reasons it is so crucial. Consider it in this manner. The only significant website whose main objective is to get you to leave is Google. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms want you to stay as long as you can.

Nonetheless, Google wants to give you the best response to your query as soon as possible. They want you to discover the data you’re looking for. In actuality, 68% of internet experiences start with a search engine, as was already established. The internet is used by B2B marketers for B2B research by about 89% of them. Also, organic traffic from SEO is 1,000% more abundant than organic traffic from social media.

Google is also becoming a bigger and bigger part of our life. It is the most widely used website in the entire globe, with people visiting it numerous times daily to find information. Every day, Google receives more than 8.7 billion searches. 92.96% of all traffic on the internet comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps combined.

We use Google to study new products, discover answers to questions, and compare costs before making a purchase. It has ingrained itself into our daily lives to the point where it serves as the default method of online search.

We can also observe the significance of SEO in how it affects consumers’ perceptions of brands. Google has a significant impact on how consumers perceive businesses and brands because it is the go-to source for information worldwide. Make sure your website is search engine optimized if you want people to think favorably of your company.

Some of the best SEO and digital agencies are listed on the DesignRush platform, so you can always check out their work or contact them for assistance.

SEO Helps You Understand the Voice of the Customer

SEO work is crucial for your company since it improves your comprehension of the Voice of the Customer (VOC), and therefore, your comprehension of all customers.

You can see the words people are using as well as the meaning behind those phrases by conducting topic and keyword research. Both general terms and specific, long-tail multi-word phrases fall under this category.

Also, SEO data displays the web queries they are posing. The People Also Ask (PAA) queries from the Google search engine results pages (SERPs), Google autocomplete, and Google Trends can be found using tools like thruuu, AlsoAsked, and AnswerSocrates. Although it isn’t quite ready for prime time, Google Question Hub exposes the questions people are asking online even when there isn’t yet any associated web information. 

But with time, we want to see its usefulness grow and to record more pertinent queries that the platform reveals. Google Search Console provides the precise keywords people are using to find your website (regardless of what they eventually clicked on).

Google Search has an autocomplete tool that expedites the completion of many searches. Google suggests several possibilities in a dropdown list for the searcher to choose from as you type your query, saving you some keystrokes if the options include what you were looking for. These autocomplete options provide yet another insight into the mindset of your target market.

Search Is an Integral Part of the Customer Journey

Think about all the different ways customers use search. They frequently turn to Google as their first resource when they are facing an issue or difficulty. They educate themselves via Google. They look for solutions to their problems through search. They look for clarification on what they ought to be studying.

They search for things on Google as well. Also, they investigate products before making a purchase. To ensure they are selecting the best option, they utilize it to compare goods and services.

The data support this. 89% of B2B researchers utilize the internet to conduct their research before making a purchasing decision. A B2B buyer typically conducts 12 separate online searches before visiting a particular website.

You could be losing out on a significant amount of money if SEO isn’t a component of your digital marketing strategy.

It’s the Most Cost-Effective Acquisition Strategy

Another advantage of SEO is that, in contrast to other marketing techniques, it enables you to expand your consumer base at a comparatively minimal cost. Your content continues to drive traffic day after day, month after month, and year after year with acquisitions from organic search. When you make a single investment in a piece of content, the returns keep flowing in.

It also gets easier and easier to attain high ranks for your content as you build an ecosystem of optimized material and as you gain more trust from Google.

It turns into a small marketing flywheel. It is comparable to adding a salesperson to your team.

The difference between all of this and PPC advertisements is evident. The instant you turn off paid search advertisements, the targeted traffic stops coming. Paid search ads are an efficient approach to drive traffic. Moreover, the cost of advertising reduces margin and raises CAC.

On the other hand, SEO activities need a long-term commitment but also yield long-term rewards. Even if it can take a comprehensive blog article you publish six months to rank on Google’s top page, it still has the ability to drive organic search traffic for years. The average Return on organic search is 5.3X, compared to 2X from paid advertising, which is the cherry on top.

SEO Is Outstanding for PR

PR benefits greatly from SEO as well. Your internet visibility and brand awareness increase as more and more of your pages appear high in search results. Also, your standing as a reliable brand grows. Most individuals unconsciously equate first page search results with reliability, whether they realize it or not.

Having control of the first page of search results for branded terms is another benefit of SEO for PR. You don’t want any unfavorable comments to show up on Google’s first page for your branded terms. You want to “own” all of the unsponsored links, including news listings, that show up when someone searches for your brand or product.

You can identify what’s trending or seeing a spike in interest using SEO topic and keyword research. This makes it possible for your PR staff to take advantage of opportunities to participate in the discourse and to acquire media coverage at the right time.

One more way that SEO helps your PR is through link building, which is a crucial component of SEO. You may frequently get a write-up or other form of publicity by producing a research study and pitching it to bloggers and the media, and you’ll also get a backlink to your landing page about the report. Writing guest posts for well-known industry websites or participating in pertinent podcasts are two more typical link-building strategies. 

This not only increases the size of your audience but also secures you an important backlink to your website. More people learn about you and your company every time you write a guest article or participate on a relevant podcast. In this sense, SEO and PR complement one another because what works well for one typically works well for the other.

SEO Creates a Superior User Experience

User experience is now a more important consideration for Google when deciding how to rank pages. Google doesn’t want to direct users to pages that are challenging to use since it wants to provide the greatest experience possible.

In order to create a great user experience, you must have:

• The website that is mobile-friendly.
• Optimized loading times 
• minimal disturbances, such pop-ups or advertisements
• Simple to use navigation
• internally relevant links

Also, structuring your material in an intuitive manner makes it easier for both searchers and Google to navigate your website and discover the information they’re looking for. Are the labels for the various parts on your website clear? Are the categories and subsections easy to understand? Is the relationship between the pages obvious?

SEO Is Measurable

When you take into account how quantifiable SEO is, you can see just how important it is. Organic search has a wide range of statistics that may be measured, including keyword difficulty, organic traffic, and backlinks.

Also, you can manipulate the data to gain even more insights.

For instance, you can check the organic visitor counts for new vs. returning visitors. Statistical statistics for organic searches by state or city. or visits resulting from organic search terms. The clarity and value of your ideas might increase with the level of detail in your view.