As a business owner, you must have heard that search engine optimization or SEO is crucial to the success of your website and your digital marketing efforts. But unless you’re a web development company or have credible experience in website design, it’s only natural that you may not know the details of SEO.

For most people, digital marketing is primarily about web design. They believe that once they have a good-looking website with lots of visuals and copy, their digital marketing will take off. So, how do they go about getting a website?

They will choose an attractive template from a website builder and upload their images and content. The moment the website goes live, they believe that their digital marketing will be in high gear. But soon they realize that they’re not getting enough visitors.

This is when most businesses get interested in SEO. Unfortunately, by then it could be late. Because it shouldn’t be an afterthought to your website design. SEO should be the guiding principle when you develop your site.

Whether you want to get more email subscribers or sell products online or get B2B clients for your service, if your website has to do its job, then it should be built with SEO in mind.

What is SEO?

SEO is what helps your website rank high in non-paid or organic search results. It makes it easier for people to find you online when they search for your product, category, locality, or a combination of any of those.

SEO helps you get visibility and can drive more visitors to your site. Importantly, it’s how you get relevant visitors to your website. These are people looking for solutions that you offer and precisely the traffic you need to be directed to you.

Questions and answers

To understand the importance of SEO, we need to know how search engines work. To put it simply, search engines answer questions. Even if someone doesn’t put “what,” “why”, “when” or “where” in a search, what they are asking is a question.

When an individual searches for “best way to burn calories,” what they are actually asking is the question, “What’s the best way to burn calories?”

Or if someone were to type in, “weather,London” in a search engine, the website treats it as the query, “What’s the weather in London right now?”

Once it gets the question, the search engine will start “indexing and crawling.” That’s how it searches all available resources online to deliver results. The results will be shown on the basis of how relevant and accurate they are to the query.

That process of positioning results is called “ranking.” SEO is what gets you top ranks among organic results. But visibility is only one of the reasons why brands should invest in and optimize their websites for SEO.

5 reasons why SEO is important

1. More traffic comes from organic search

Organic search accounts for the vast majority of all online searches. For most websites, it’s the primary source of traffic.

The right SEO strategy will get you these users without the need for any paid advertising or expensive campaigns on social media. Remember that any increase in traffic due to a paid advertising campaign will be short-lived and unsustainable in the long run.

2. SEO helps you find the right users

Someone searching for a product or service is already interested in knowing more about or purchasing it. These are the users a website wants instead of random visitors who may enter and exit a site quickly.

By tailoring the website content on user insights, websites can attract this customer base without having to spend on paid advertising.

3. It builds credibility

A top rank in search results conveys to users that the search engine trusts the website. Users will know that those sites will have the content they’re looking for and that other users have also benefited from visiting the site.

They would also know that the website will be easier to navigate and that it wouldn’t have any broken links. SEO is what helps build that credibility and authority. In other words, it confers the power of digital word-of-mouth.

4. SEO will direct content creation

SEO works both ways. It will help you get more visitors to consume your content and help you develop content based on those user expectations. This is one of the primary reasons why businesses shouldn’t build their websites using off-the-shelf templates and instead go to an experienced web development company.

A web design agency will first analyze what the users are searching for and then formulate a content strategy. The UI will also be designed to make it easy for users based on their frequent queries.

5. Helps in local search

Search has gone local, making it the most effective way for customers to find local businesses. Local SEO will help businesses to rank high in local search and eventually be part of the “local pack” or the collection of local businesses that Google would highlight in a box in search results.

SEO is the best tool for small and independent businesses to acquire and retain customers.

In short

Without SEO, there’ll be no digital visibility. But for SEO to be effective, all digital properties of a business, most importantly its website, should be custom-built with relevant insights, and content.