How Does SEO Help Your Business Grow

There are a lot of acronyms in the digital marketing world that leave many of us scratching our heads. Yet, business marketing acronym should turn on the light bulb burning bright in our active minds.

SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) represents the concept of increasing sales by driving more traffic to business websites. Unlike paid digital marketing strategies such as pay per click (PPC) advertising, SEO drives free traffic to the digital welcome mat of your businesses. The traffic generated that increases sales come mostly from three search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Of the three, Google is by far the most influential in motivating potential customers to take action.

4 Essential Components of SEO

SEO appears to be a digital marketing strategy that requires the expertise of an accomplished online marketing genius. However, you can break the traffic building strategy into four smaller components that make it much easier to digest.

How to Create an SEO Website

Referred to by digital marketing gurus as on-site optimization, the first order of business is to focus on creating a search engine friendly website that includes an appealing layout and structure. Although each component directly impacts SEO, all four components working in harmony ensures your business becomes a major player online.

Let’s look at the important on-site optimization factors:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Site navigation
• Up to date content
• Useful internal links
• Page download speeds
• Website security
• URLs

Quality Content Rules SEO

You have laid the digital foundation to increase sales for your business by creating a website that has visual appeal. Now, you have to fill in the gaps with helpful, relevant content that builds enough trust to convert potential customers into lifelong patrons of your business. SEO friendly content presents relevant topics that offer real solutions for customer prospects, as well as long term customers. SEO-friendly content includes a call to action that motivates your audience to at least contact your business to request more information. Google is especially diligent in rewarding businesses that present helpful content that offers easy to implement solutions.

SEO and Social Media

“Some have tried using every social network, but the common result is multiple accounts with little to no interaction. A better strategy is to focus on just a couple of social networks or even one social network.”  – Neil Patel

Considered one of the most influential digital marketers, Neil Patel hits the proverbial nail on the head with his sage advice about SEO and social media. If you type in a few words into the Google search engine and press the enter button, you should see at least one social media site on the first page of the leading search engine. The key is to give your audience quick access to your social media sites on the first page of your business website.

Boost Credibility with Inbound Links

It’s wise to link to outside resources to give your content credence in the business world. Nonetheless, SEO-friendly websites contain numerous inbound links that come from what Google considers to be “authoritative” sources of information. Links from experts in your field, as well as links from social media pages, is a must-do SEO strategy for increasing business sales. You should spend time building relationships with like-minded professionals, before asking for incoming links to your business website.

How SEO Helps Businesses Increase Sales

Because of the highly competitive nature of the business, a rapidly growing number of businesses have invested a large part of their marketing budgets to improving SEO. The question is how does the investment in SEO help your business grow.

Get Noticed in Search Engines

Think about how you shop for stuff online. First, you type a few keywords into a search engine. After the first few businesses appear in your search results, do you keep clicking additional pages or do you stay clicking links to the highest ranking businesses?

You stay one page one and most likely, you look at the first couple of ranked businesses.

Creating a successful SEO strategy gets your business ranked higher in each of the three major search engines. Higher ranked businesses reap the financial benefit of increased sales.

Convert Customer Prospects with SEO

You do not have to memorize every digital marketing calculation, but there is one calculation that directly impacts business sales.

Conversion rate.

The conversion rate is the ratio between the number of customer prospects and the number of customer prospects that end up buying products and services from your business. Highly targeted SEO strategies turn potential customers into lifelong patrons of your business. As you know, most of your sales are generated by a small percentage of your customers. By increasing the conversion rate, you will grow your loyal customer base.

Keep Your Customers Coming Back for More with SEO

Attracting and converting customers is one thing; engaging with your customers to keep them coming back for more is quite another thing. An SEO-friendly website encourages feedback from customers by including forms, message boards, and places for your customers to add their two cents when it comes to providing helpful tips. Making your business website SEO-friendly also makes your website customer friendly. Here is an equation that is easy to understand: Happy customers equals more sales.

Enhanced Brand Awareness with SEO

You cannot buy what you cannot see. Pretty simple idea, but far too many small business owners fail to understand the critical importance of brand awareness. Moving your business up to the first search engine ranking page (preferably within the top three businesses listed) is the most effective way to boost brand awareness. Back in the day, enhancing brand awareness meant renting a billboard for a month or taking out a 15-second television commercial.

Now it means improving your business SEO strategy.

Whether you run a one-store business or operate a chain of multiple stores, improving your SEO strategy is a surefire way to increase sales. Other than superior customer service, there is not a more compelling method for boosting sales than making the SEO for your business soar.