Today, SEO rankings are an important aspect of business marketing.
Whether your business model focuses on business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), virtually all your potential customers will start the buying process with an online search — with very few exceptions.
More than ever, strong SEO rankings are imperative for the survival and growth of your company. But the competition for those coveted first-page spots is off the charts.
In the SEO industry, we know how important rankings are. And that’s why we spend a lot of time tracking our clients’ rankings, so that we can adapt their optimization strategy for maximum effectiveness.
Although being on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is important, it’s not enough.
Whoever earns that coveted first position in the SERPs wins almost a full third of web traffic. The second position gets only a little more than half of that, while the third position earns you just over 10 percent of the traffic.
If you’re 10th in the SERPs, you may get between 2 and 3 percent of the hits. Once you fall to the second page, however, you’ll be lucky to get 1 percent of the traffic.
While getting to the first page — or even the first position — in the SERPs might increase your site’s traffic, it does not guarantee an increase in your sales. Yes, you want to rank highly, but unless you rank for the right keywords and key phrases, it won’t translate to higher sales.
Choosing the right keywords for your business is one of the trickiest and most important aspects of SEO. It’s a high-wire balancing act that requires getting into your prospects’ heads to identify how they are searching for products or services like yours. It also requires having the knowledge and resources to conduct keyword research.
Yes, you want your site to be the best performer in the search engines, but you have to ensure it’s the best performer for the best keywords.
Ranking highly in the SERPs increases traffic to your website substantially, and when done correctly, improves your bottom line. But this accomplishment also provides some other critical benefits that increase your return on investment (ROI).
Provides Key Consumer Metrics
Google Analytics has the ability to show us a wealth of information about consumers who search for your keywords and who make their way to your website. The higher your site ranks, the more data you will have to evaluate. This allows you to tweak your online marketing strategy to be more responsive to the needs of the marketplace.
Improves Brand Recognition
The more frequently your prospects catch a glimpse of your business name, the more recognizable your company becomes. The higher you show up in the SERPs, the more frequently consumers see your brand. So even if they aren’t in the market for your products or services today, they are much more likely to seek you out the next time they are.
Enhances Business Credibility
Your prospects searching online for products and services understand what it takes to get to the top of the search engine rankings. They understand how competitive the online marketing environment is, and they know that companies have to work hard to snag those coveted top spots in the SERPs. If your company has what it takes for Google to boost you to the top of the pile, prospects will notice — and remember you.
Good search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to propel your website to the top of the SERPs, but it’s something you must remain diligent about week after week.
You can improve your chances of making it to the top with well-designed and managed pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, using platforms like Google AdWords.
If you serve a local market, you can leverage Google Local Search (GLS) to boost your local SEO rankings further.
But the basis of all SEO efforts is organic. This typically involves optimizing your website for SEO, content marketing with blogs and social bookmarking, social media marketing, link building and similar strategies, all of which depend on identifying the right keywords and key phrases for your business.
The Be Locally SEO team focuses on using these strategies to help our clients achieve their goals for business and revenue growth. We take the potentially vague and confusing quest for improved search rankings and translate it to actionable tasks and measurable results. Contact one of our search engine optimization experts today to learn how we can help you improve your company’s SEO rankings.