This article is going to talk about the importance of SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. We will look at the benefits of doing SEO weekly on your website, the disadvantages of not conducting SEO, and the consequences of ceasing to conduct SEO weekly on your site.
Executive Summary
- SEO is critical for growing website traffic, dominating your market and growing your customer base
- SEO is important for Google to recognize and rank your website more often in search results
- Without conducting SEO on your website, it is very likely that your website traffic will stay stagnant and could even decrease if one of your competitors decides to undertake a strong SEO campaign
Defining SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process by which websites can optimize their content in order to rank higher on search engines such as Google and attract more visitors to their website. For more information see how you can generate more sales with SEO.
Why is SEO Important?
Conducting SEO work on your website weekly is highly important to the overall success of your website. It ensures that your website’s layout and content are optimized to take advantage of everything that both visitors and Google are looking for in your website. A website that utilizes quality SEO will find itself increasing their traffic and ranking above competitors who do not have the same level and frequency of SEO work being done.
Alternatively, a website that does not utilize SEO will find their traffic stagnate at best, and likely will drop each month. Any website that wants to gain additional visitors per month should utilize SEO services that conduct work on their website each week. Publishing new, SEO optimized, content regularly to your website is a major part of the SEO process as it shows Google that your website is active and contains fresh content when compared to websites that only update annually or that have not been updated since it was created.
Why Does Google Care About SEO?
Google cares immensely about how optimized your website is for their search engine. They need to be able to identify what your website is all about, and what topics and questions can be answered by each of the pages on the website. Google wants to provider search engine users with the best answers to their searches. If Google can't determine what questions your pages can answer, it won't send people to them.
I have heard it said that “Good content will rise to the top” and while that is partly true, good content is only half the equation. If Google doesn’t know what the content is talking about, it won’t be able to send traffic to that content.
For example, this article “More Leads and More Clients”. This web page has excellent information comparing different online advertising methods, and it also is properly optimized for search engines by having effective keywords (Cost Per Click, Cost Per Impression) that are not only used in the title, but also in the meta-description, the URL and the page title. If this article was called something simpler like “Online Advertising Costs”, Google would have a much harder time figuring out what the page was targeting exactly.
There are likely thousands of pages all focusing on “Online Advertising Costs”. By adding in the additional keywords of “Cost Per Click” and “Cost per Impression” (which are also long tail keywords) it narrows down what the page is focusing on, and Google can get a more accurate picture of the keywords this article is geared at.
The simpler title/keyword would have just been buried under thousands of other pages all talking about “Online Advertising”, since “Online Advertising Costs” is a fairly general term.
Will My Website Get Traffic Without SEO?
Without any kind of SEO or other traffic generation service (such as Ads) your website will likely get a very small portion of traffic each week. Before starting out with us, many of our clients were averaging 10-20 visitors per week. Upon completion of a few months of SEO, usually that traffic increases to 300-500 per week. After a year or two of our services the traffic is even higher and continues to grow consistently over time.
Likely the largest source of traffic without utilizing SEO will be visitors who already know your website exists and are looking for your specific company. Potential visitors that are searching for the services that your company offers will visit a competitor’s website that has better SEO. This means that your website is missing out on a massive source of traffic.
What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
If you don't know what SEO is I will describe it here. If you already know what it is reading this paragraph will not be a good use of your time and I would suggest you skip forward to the next paragraph. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
