For growth and sustainability, it's a must for businesses to connect with their customers so they can improve their business processes and services. One of the ways to do this is by performing market intelligence, part of which is conducting surveys to determine how their customers found them.
According to Yelp, 85% of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses, and search engine optimization (SEO) plays a significant role. Here are three reasons why SEO is a critical piece of your strategy, and instrumental in achieving your business goals:
SEO Helps Increase Leads and Conversions
No matter how great your website design is, at the end of the day, it's your sales revenue that matters. It’s a misconception that if you get high traffic, you will also automatically get a high conversion rate. Here’s the cold, hard truth: High website traffic is useless if the visitors are not your target market. It’s like getting people to visit a sports store when they’re interested in buying hardware supplies.
SEO helps increase leads and conversions when they align keyword research with your buyer's persona and target market. It works when the business website appears on top pages in search results for the "keywords" customers are typing in search engines. By using the right keywords, you are driving the right traffic to the website.
SEO Helps Brand Awareness and Recognition
Brand awareness is important for the company to establish a long-term position in the marketplace. When people know your business and products, they trust to buy more from you. Since most consumers linger online, it would be smart to position your business in search results.
Online visibility creates memorable branding for existing and potential customers that generate awareness of your company and products. An increase in brand awareness happens when users search for your “company name” or “keywords that describe your business”, and you appear on search, maps, images, videos, or news results.
SEO Helps Build Customer Relationships
Customer retention happens when you build relationships with your customers. When you listen, respond, and act according to your customers’ needs and challenges, you increase customer satisfaction, which in turn creates trust and loyalty to your brand. As invesproc.com succinctly puts it: "It costs five times as much to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one."
This can be achieved online by engaging with your target customers on websites they visit frequently. SEO helps create and implement campaigns to keep in touch with customers on different platforms such as corporate blogs, social media, niche community sites, review sites, and question-and-answer sites.
Business owners should understand that SEO is a long-term investment. A typical SEO marketing campaign requires at least 4-6 months before you can see the initial results. Stopping mid-campaign essentially means throwing away the money you invested. It’s a continuous process requiring constant improvement on the strategy, which is accomplished by looking at the results you collect and analyze monthly. If done right, just like a snowball rolling down a mountain and increasing in size, your business can reap its exponentially growing benefits.
View our SEO packages and see how creative process outsourcing can be a good solution for your business.
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