9 Reasons Why SEO Investment Should be a Top Priority

Do you know each year, small and big companies around the world spend $79 billion on their SEO – search engine optimization? And soon, that number will be going to explode in the coming years. As predicted by experts, in 2025, ‘machine learning’ and ‘deep neural networking’ powered search engines’ market value will touch the $55 billion mark.

With all the happenings taking place around the word ‘SEO,’ businesses should understand the hype behind them and try to adapt to the incoming changes as soon as possible. If they do not, they will soon be counted among people losing on 1000x annual boost in traffic generated from doing best optimization practices.

Here’s what you should know about investing in SEO to make it one of the best things that ever happened to your business.

SEO Builds Your Brand

Relevant and strategically targeted SEO practices can improve the brand’s awareness significantly. Enhancing your site’s loading speed, improving readability, enriching content, and remodeling the overall page structure and responsiveness can help you turn in a vast audience that is ready to fall in love with your product.

Moreover, while focusing on SEO, further planning on content writing, marketing, link-building, and on-page optimization, any brand website or product can land itself on the first page of Google. And according to data, more than 80% of users don’t bother to look at other articles after scrutinizing the first five results on SERPs. This shows the effectiveness of landing on the first page.

According to Sam Hollingsworth:

“If you’re not on Page 1 of Google, you’re losing out more than you apprehend.”

Putting ‘Google’ in context helps us to align our goals more coherently, as more than 90% of people have Google’s search engine as their first choice for any query. But it doesn’t imply that other search engines don’t add ‘meaning’ to the site. They all work in harmony to elevate the brand’s credibility for end users.

Once the site’s content, graphics, SEO attributes, and structure improves, the juice it produces massively impact the site’s ranking on SERPs and authority and awareness among customers.

More Organic Traffic

‘Traffic’ comes first when focusing on the end goal of generating leads. To maintain the consistency of the influx of quality traffic; the following adjustments are necessary on the website, along with SEO practices – which will be explained later:

Write solution-oriented content: It’s the most basic thing, yet many writers seem to ignore it. Giving the precise answers to the user’s query helps you achieve many points; out of many, two of them are: it will make your site land in ‘Google’s featured snippets’ and second is it ‘builds credibility and trust.’

Build an email list: Email lists are still (a lot) relevant in 2022. More than 80% of B2-B marketers say ’email marketing’ is their pre-eminent content marketing strategy. Email is a great medium to connect more personally with your customers. It isn’t directly associated with SEO but introducing them helps you target specific pages, thus reducing bounce rate and driving relevant traffic, which is preferred by SEO.

Target both short and long-tail keywords: Don’t always go after ‘low volume, high searched’ queries. Make a list of less-searched keywords and make compelling, organized, and unique content out of it. The chances of that ‘content’ ranking are more likely than others due to less competition.

Dominate on-page SEO techniques: Leveraging your website’s on-page SEO helps you understand what Google demands and expects from a professional website. Data shows that “once you optimize your pages using best on-page practices, you’re more likely to land on 1st page than your parallels who haven’t.”

SEO Helps You Understand Your Target Audience

With the introduction of exceptional analytical tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Analytics, the chances of understanding your audience are more significant than ever. Such tools provide quality insights that are often overlooked or neglected by site owners. Some of the examples are:

1. More personalized AI insights and perceptions about the site.
2. Bounce rate problems and what’s the quick fix.
3. What are your users searching for?
4. Complete SERPs analysis.
5. 404-page errors.

Along with the aforementioned observations, AI-powered tools raise many minor and complex issues once you enable them on your site or product.

Improving SEO Means Improving User Experience

SEO and UI/ UX are distinct fields having no relation whatsoever if thinking from the conventional thought process. Entire a decade of Google updates [2011-2021] is intentionally made with the goal of enhancing the user experience for end users.

From Panda to Hummingbird, E-A-T to Quality Updates in 2015, and Mobile-First Indexing to Pandemic Response in 2020, each and every update is focused on improving the three buzz or cliche words/ indicators:

‘Content optimization’ for web and mobile audiences.
‘User intent’ with some ‘local SEO.’
User ‘behavior’ and ‘experience.’

Recently, Google enrolled another update that focuses on the aspect of improving ‘page-loading speed’ – a significant contributor to enhancing user experience, followed by strengthening SEO.

Investing in SEO is Relatively Affordable

While there are hundreds of options available to promote your business online, out of them, SEO is more approachable and a lot cheaper. Many SEO-related tasks, from building backlinks to writing content to guest posting, can be handled by a small team.

Moreover, SEO-related work, even if out-sourced, doesn’t impact big on the company’s pocket. A small case study conducted by an online agency revealed that:

“For acquiring good SEO services from the reputable workforce, the budget should be around $5000 per month.”

And we all know accumulating such a budget wouldn’t be much of an issue for many small companies. Once you set the budget, everything will be done by an agency.

It Creates Credibility And Authority

One thing to remember is that Google never promotes any site on their search engines if they find anything dubious. If on a user’s search query, your site pops up on the SERPs, then it will be automatically accepted as a verified, credible brand.

Before indexing your site on their search platform, Google runs hundreds of AI and ML-based algorithms over it. Those algorithms maintain checks on quality, probable frauds, user-friendliness, etc., and provide filtered search results catered to user queries.

Furthermore, ranking well on Google improves the site’s ‘page and domain authority – PA and DA.’ After achieving good DA, you will be seen as a more trustworthy and favorable brand in your customer’s eyes.

If you want to learn more about DA and PA, visit the Moz learning website, as they are the originator of these SEO indicators.

Building Local SEO Helps a Lot

Local SEO is the technique a business can use to magnify its brand’s local presence in its country, city, or town. Local SEO isn’t a newly launched option; it’s been on the market since 2003. But, in 2015, when Google started focusing on its local search engine parameters, it got ample attention from the digital marketer’s circle.

The option to opt for local SEO is available for a variety of businesses, including hairstyling, eCommerce, software solutions, and you name it. There is considerable research done on the importance of performing this strategy; one of them says:

“More than 90% of Google searches were done by consumers searching for the presence of the local business.”

To establish your site’s local SEO, you need to consider the following changes:

• Establish a Google My Business page and optimize your business listings.
• Create landing pages catered to your local audience.
• Perform geo-specific keyword research.
• Send your site to local directories.

These tips are just what you perform as quick fixes. Local SEO practices are more than that. To successfully execute them, you need a long-term strategy that focuses only on improving brand awareness and visibility to a local audience.

SEO Results Are Quantifiable

As discussed previously about analytical tools’ ability to target the right audience, they are also instrumental in measuring the results of each of your activities on the site. By obtaining quantifiable results:

• You can make further improvements to existing strategies.
• Content distribution and user experience can improve.
• The site’s structure and usability can be enhanced.
• Experiment with new stuff examining analytics.
• Doorways to new possibilities can open.

You can do almost anything by examining the results obtained through the measurable outcomes of the SEO tools. It helps you to adapt to new changes and filter out what’s unnecessary.

SEO is a Long-Term Strategy

SEO is here to stay, period! Since the advent of Google, which happened in 1998, search engine optimization techniques were there and continually updated as the ‘engine’ proceeded with further developments.

Back then, just putting the content out there (online) made you stand out among your competitors. Moving on, keyword stuffing had the potential to do wonders. After further innovations, Google keeps coming back with new and more advanced updates each year, catering to their user’s behavior, which ultimately changes SEO’s way of doing work.

Now, in 2022, after 24 years, search engine optimization is more comprehensive and contains a lot of factors for successfully carrying it out. Due to its extensive application in various fields, many professionals have made their careers out of it, and soon many will be.

Hence, the crux of the discussion is to utilize SEO in your business as soon as possible. There are many ways to do it; find your perfect strategy and stick to it until it’s yielding positive results.

What’s The Next Step?

SEO is constantly changing with new trends evolving in the marketing world and in human psychology. To understand the SEO more thoroughly, you have to understand the intent of the Google searchers before they are searching for the keyword you want to rank for. Only then can you make perfect SEO investment strategies tailored to your brand.