What Is SEO and How Does it Impact Your Business?
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a digital marketing discipline that has grown rapidly in recent years. Put simply, SEO is the practice of using search engines like Google and Bing to market your business and get your brand in front of the billions of people who are searching online each day.
And while search engines like Google do offer paid advertising methods, SEO is how you take advantage of the marketing potential that search engines offer without paying for ads.
The SEO Effect
SEO is just a piece of any great digital marketing strategy, but it’s a pretty integral one. There are plenty of activities you could invest in to grow your business using the internet:
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Video / YouTube Marketing
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
The list goes on and on. One beautiful thing about SEO that sets it apart from other forms of digital marketing is this:
People are already looking for something.
If you buy ads on Facebook, you’re essentially disrupting someone who was browsing mindlessly through their feed. If you make posts on Instagram, people see your post as their scrolling through hundreds of other photos of friends. You may catch their attention, but you might not.
On the other hand, when someone takes to a search engine, they’re already looking for something. This is the SEO effect.
SEO is about putting yourself in front of people’s questions and offering a solution.
How Does SEO Impact My Business?
Back to the original question. The real answer is: if you’re not ranking well on search engines, it’s not impacting your business. You’re leaving 3.5 billion opportunities on the table every single day.
But if you are ranking on search engines, the impact could be tremendous. You could be generating thousands of additional visitors to your website each month. If your site is good at converting traffic into leads, you could have hundreds more leads each month. That’s how SEO impacts your business. The SEO effect is huge.
What Is the Goal of SEO?
For the majority of businesses, the goal of SEO is to gain leads from search engines, by:
- Increasing organic traffic
- Increasing keyword rankings
- Ranking for more keywords
n order to gain leads, you need organic traffic. And in order to gain organic traffic, you need to rank highly for keywords your audience is searching for.
Vice versa, the more keywords you rank for, the more Google real estate you take up. And the more real estate you take up, the better the chances someone winds up on your website. And the more often people land on your website, (theoretically) the more leads your business receives.
