When you’re looking to make a purchase (especially a big one), how often do you think, “I’ll take a quick look online…” You may be doing product research, looking for reviews, hunting for a bargain or finding out what physical stores stock the product or what service providers can help.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is what puts these businesses front and centre when you’re doing this research or online shopping. There’s a saying in the SEO community that the best place to hide a body is on page two of Google — because no one goes there. If your business isn’t on page one, you need SEO.
Just look at our client, Total Environmental Concepts. After they invested in SEO, they saw a 497% increase in website traffic, resulting in a 700% increase in leads. If that’s not proof SEO is an investment, we don’t know what is.
And yet, so many businesses still look at SEO like an expense, not a powerful money-making investment. “Another marketing expense?!” We hear you! But we are about to make you eat your words and be singing the praises of SEO!
What can SEO do for my business?
The goal of search engine optimisation (SEO) is to get your business as high as possible in organic search engine results for the most relevant search queries to your business. For example, if you’re a plumber in Brisbane, the goal would be to get to the number one spot when people search for ‘Brisbane plumber’, ‘plumber in Brisbane’, or better still ‘New Farm plumber’.
Oh, you want numbers? Well, we’ve got them. Our client, Aurora Training saw an 104% increase in website traffic with their SEO campaign, while Plus One Vet in Brisbane experienced a 3400% increase in calls in just six months. What could results like this do for your business and lifestyle? The answer is, a lot!
5 Reasons Why You Should Invest in SEO
1. 93% of online experiences start on a search engine.
More and more people are shopping online. And if they’re not shopping online, they’re looking for a business to help them on Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go and other search engines. But you’re not going to get into these search results if you’re not investing in your search engine optimisation (SEO).
An important area of SEO is increasing the number of keywords your website shows up under, not just improving the positioning of the ones you currently show up for. This is a good way to increase the number of people who find your web pages, visit your website, and if your website is optimised for users and conversions, your sales and enquiries too.
2. It’s a long-game giving you results long into the future.
You’ve likely heard SEO can take time to start working. On average, it takes a business between 3 to 6 months (or even more for difficult industries and markets) to start seeing results from their SEO campaign. And this is critical to know and understand, as you can’t rush a good SEO campaign. However, once your campaign is working, you’ll be reaping the rewards for a long time.
Typically speaking, once you have a solid SEO strategy and you’re on the move, there’s not a lot that will shake your standings (though, certain things like big Google updates can). This is opposed to things like paid search ads, where when the budget is used up, the ad is done. Organic SEO has a long-term sustainability for your business that paid ads just can’t offer.
For example, we have several clients who have been with us for many years, and we’ve seen once they get onto page one, they stay there. Sure, they might fluctuate one or two places, but they’re still there – and often ranking above bigger-name competitors in their industry. This does take monthly SEO maintenance to continue doing, but it’s a lot less work than trying to get those rankings back because you haven’t touched your site in six months.
Overall, organic SEO can be incredibly beneficial for your business. There are more eyes online now than there have ever been before, so it’s important to make sure that your website is in front of the customers you want.
3. It improves the quality of your website traffic and leads.
Do you ever get phone calls or emails that are a complete waste of time? People looking for things you don’t even do or services you don’t even mention on your website? Investing in SEO helps you pinpoint who your ideal customer is, what they’re searching for online and aims to get your business in front of them by targeting these specific keywords.
Many agencies will target the high volume keywords to bring you a lot of traffic to make you feel like you’re getting results. But what good is traffic to your website if it’s not bringing you business? This is the difference between an SEO campaign that brings you traffic and an SEO campaign that brings you ready-to-engage potential customers.
4. It increases your conversions.
Google ranks websites that provide a good user experience. They want to supply their users with websites that not only give them the best quality answer to the search query, but that are secure, have the authority to give that advice, are easy to navigate and more. It can be a lot of work. But the big advantage is that these improvements also help increase your conversions.
SEO focused on improving the user experience of your website. A better user experience means it will be easier to navigate your website, giving people the information they need, and leading to more enquiries and/or sales. And you thought SEO was just about getting you to show up on Google!
5. It can increase the return on investment for your other marketing.
Improved user experience and your web page content isn’t just good for your search engine results either. These are also factors that Google, Meta and other paid ads platforms look for when deciding how much to charge you per click when running ads through them. Yes, that’s right, you can increase your return on investment with an SEO campaign, even though it’s not directly related.
Let’s use Google Ads for example. They use something called an ad score to help determine how much you should pay per click on your ad to your website. Their idea is to increase the quality of the landing pages advertisers are sending users to, but for ad strategists, it’s all about increasing return on investment. The lower the cost per click, the higher the return on investment. And remember, with all that user experience optimisation, you’re also increasing your chances of conversions.
Should you invest in an SEO agency?
There’s a lot involved in an SEO campaign, even though you may not see that work. Aside from all the backend work to your website, like increasing your page speed and cleaning up your code for user experience, there’s the endless amounts of keyword research and content creation. And that’s just the beginning.
SEO takes a significant amount of time. In fact, if you don’t have time to spare daily to check your data and do weekly optimisation, then it’s time to invest in an SEO agency. Plus, to fully optimise your website, you’ll need time to research Google algorithm updates, be able to accurately read and interpret data, write optimised content, do the required search, and even know some code. We could honestly keep going about the work that goes into an effective SEO campaign.
Investing in SEO is invaluable to your business. Actually, no, it’s essential. If you need help with your SEO or how our Australian SEO specialists can optimise your website, get in touch today.
