Why is SEO so important for your business?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a number of digital processes and techniques implemented to help improve and increase the visibility of your website within a search engine’s index. When implementing an SEO strategy, you can expect an increase in organic traffic to your website however, when done right and combined with a lead generation strategy, you will reap the benefit of increasing the quality of your website traffic, i.e. people who are interested in your business’ offering as well as generate quality leads for your business.
In this blog post, we’ll answer three important questions relating to SEO:
- Why is SEO Services important?
- How does SEO generate leads for my company?
- What do SEO Services include?
1. Why is SEO Services important?
The challenge that many South African internet users have today is one of trust. Crime and very disappointing online experiences have forced many users to take a more cautious approach when it comes to buying products online and engaging with potential service providers that they are unfamiliar with. With such mistrust, how can one build trust for your brand?
Users, however, trust search engines like Google and Bing, to deliver accurate, high-quality content to their search enquiries. In fact 9 out of 10 people who use the internet trust Google to provide answers to questions that help solve their challenges; find products and services and/or solutions; to find directions and more.
For your brand and website to appear within search engine results pages, it must meet over 200 factors within search engine algorithms. Implementing SEO technieques is crucial for building credibility, trust and authority for your users as well as Google. If you’re unsure about what SEO Techniques involve, read more below or reach out to a digital marketing and SEO Agency such as Ignite Media, for professional SEO Services.
Appearing within the top positions of Google’s or Bing’s first search results page should be your brand and website’s goal. Latest research provided by Firstpagesage confirm the organic click-through rate (CTR) is 39.6% when your website appears in position 1 of Google search results page, compared to a CTR of 2.1% for a Google PPC Ad in position 1 . These findings alone should motivate brands to invest in SEO Services and techniques.
2. How does SEO activities generate leads for my company?
When your website appears in search often, it influences your potential customer about your brand and offering, building trust and credibility which allows them to take the next step to engage with your brand.
Combining SEO with your lead generation strategies is recommended. You could do this by offering visitors an unresistible invitation to access content that will be valuable to them by exchanging their contact details in order to obtain it. This will allow your company to make contact or nurture the lead via email marketing.
3. What do SEO Services include?
Not every SEO Service is the same and therefore it is important for you to understand the differences. Your SEO Budget will also influence what your SEO Service provider can offer you. To provide you with a full understanding of what SEO services include, we’ve listed the frequency of SEO activities and provided explanations to help you understand why they are important.
3.1 SEO Audit
When approaching an SEO service provider, an SEO audit is recommended. An SEO audit is the process of analysing your website’s current structure and position against best practice. The outcome is to identify whether any fundamental issues are impacting your website’s performance in search that would need to be rectified.
We recommend that an SEO audit is completed at least once a year.
3.2 SEO Strategy
An SEO strategy needs to be completed at least once every three or four months. Your SEO strategy is a detailed plan covering technical, on-page, and off-page SEO techniques as well as the content that will support your strategy. It reviews your competitors in search, your keyword strategy as well as the overall user experience to identify any areas that can be improved upon.
3.3 Monthly SEO Activities
The frequency with which you implement your SEO Strategy will determine how aggressively you would like to build visibility and ranking for your respective keywords. The more often you publish content in line with your SEO strategy, the more frequently search engine bots visit your website to crawl and index your content.
Monthly SEO activities also include completing on-page SEO including meta descriptions and alt tags as well as link-building activities via off-page SEO strategies that will help build authority for your website.
Be sure to ask your SEO Agency whether your SEO budget will cover both on-page and off-page SEO activities as your budget may limit you to only on-page SEO services.
Both on-page and off-page SEO strategies are crucial, as off-page SEO strategies are ranking signals. When other websites are linking to your website, this signals value and authority and helps to improve your website’s ranking position within search results.
3.4 Monitoring & Tracking
Monitoring and tracking your SEO performance is crucial because without doing so, you will not know how well your strategy is working; or whether changes to your strategy are required depending upon the results. There are a number of ways in which you could monitor and track performance, namely:
3.4.1 Organic Search Traffic. This metric measures how many users and sessions are arriving on your website organically. In other words, visitors typed in a search term and arrived at your website as a result of seeing your website appear in the search engine results page.
3.4.2 Search Rankings. Monitoring your website’s position in search for your targeted keywords will help you identify how well your SEO strategy is doing.
3.4.3 SEO Impressions are the number of times your website appears in search for the respective targeted keyword and as a result, your website was visible to your user.
Along with SEO impressions, monitoring your Organic CTR (click-through rate) will be important as it indicates how valuable will indicate how attractive your website is in which presents how many visitors saw your website and clicked through to your website.
Since no rank is created equal, calculating your organic CTRs helps you gauge just how valuable each rank position is to your site. It also allows you to estimate organic web traffic — depending on your rates, a drop from position two to eight might result in a 42 percent decrease in traffic for that keyword.
Monitoring and tracking your SEO performance will guide future strategies so that improvements are made.
SEO Services Cape Town
SEO is an ongoing inbound marketing process that should produce favourable results for your business. As an SEO Company in Cape Town, Ignite Media has seen great success with our SEO services, helping our clients attract a relevant audience, increase traffic and conversions on their website. If you want your business to grow and grow fast, you need to prioritise digital marketing activities that incorporate lead generation and use tactics such as SEO to get as many prospects noticing your business and taking the next step to enter your sales funnel.
