Every business, big or small, needs to run a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. There are several reasons for this.
SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a website in search engine results pages. This is important because most surfers only consider what is in the first page. Statistics show that 60% of all clicks go to the first result in the SERP(Search Engine Results Pages) in Google.
SEO not only increases your visibility and consequently your conversion rates, but it also brings you out as an expert in your niche. Most surfers erroneously believe that companies that rank higher are better than those that rank lower and you should take advantage of this.
People trust Google and SEO is, therefore, a way of building your brand and of doing reputation management. With over 250,000,000 websites on the World Wide Web, appearing on the first page of SERP(Search Engine Results Pages) truly makes you stand out.
SEO is important because your competitors are probably doing it. Catching up will be very difficult if you are left behind. This is particularly so if you sell products/services over the Internet. Establishing a good website and having superior products will not help you if you do not run an SEO campaign.
SEO is important because the SEO process will give you valuable data. You will get information on what your customers are looking for, the demographics of your customers, the frequency of purchase, and other valuable customer data. Good SEO companies give you regular SEO reports. This data will help you with product development.
The SEO process involves working on such aspects of your website as the code, graphics, loading speed, navigation, and content. This leads to a general improvement of your site which further improves your conversion rates.
You should run an SEO campaign because the results you get are low cost compared to those of such PPC campaigns as AdWords. SEO results are permanent. Although you have to make some effort to maintain your top 10 spot, the effort is minimal.
You should, however, ensure that your SEO campaign is White Hat. Black Hat SEO tactics like cloaking and spamdexing could get your site banned while Grey Hat SEO tactics such as duplicate content are never effective with the regular Google Penguin updates. Consider such tactics as link building, XML sitemap creation, social bookmarking, and the creation of quality content.