Use of SEO limited to websites: true or myth?

SEO is synonymous with organic growth. Search engine optimization promises the most long-term and cost-effective results of all the channels for marketing your brand online.

The fact that 68% of online experiences start with a search query shows exactly how helpful SEO can be for your brand.

But SEO’s benefits are not limited to just your website. While optimization enhances your website’s discoverability and drives organic traffic, consistent SEO efforts can bring a lot more to the table. If you want to build brand awareness, reach the right audience, and increase conversions—SEO can help you achieve these goals.

Is the importance of SEO limited to websites?

SEO plays a crucial role in increasing your website’s clickthrough rates—especially when the top five search results enjoy 68% of all clicks. But many businesses mistake SEO to be just a strategy to get higher rankings on search results.

In reality, SEO can secure a host of other benefits for your business. That’s probably why an average US business spends around $497 on SEO services every month!

So, read ahead to find out how SEO can boost your business in six crucial ways.

1. Builds credibility and authority beyond your website

Fact: 75% of users trust the site ranking on the first page of search results.

SEO establishes credibility and authority for your brand by securing a place in the top search results. A responsive and easily navigable website enhances the user experience and ranks higher as well. But multiple other factors come into play for optimizing your website for search engines.

Google uses the E-A-T paradigm to determine a website’s SERP ranking by testing its

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness.

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You can ace these parameters through on-page and off-page optimization. Here are some crucial elements for achieving this:

• High-quality content: Quality content on multiple topics relevant to your industry will inform and engage your readers. Address your target audience’s pain points and focus on providing useful solutions. Understand the search intent to answer the user query precisely. Content marketing agency will help you increase website traffic across all of your digital marketing channels.
• Build links: Google’s PageRank algorithm measures the quantity and quality of links for your brand. Create a bulletproof internal linking strategy and manage the backlinks for your website. The number of links citing back to your website is important in determining your domain authority.
• Website speed: Your website’s loading speed affects the user experience and its bounce rate as well. With the right tools for image compression, server optimization, and page file size, you can improve your page speed.

2. Helps in understanding your target audience better

One of the most important objectives of SEO is satisfying the user intent—the purpose or intention behind a search query made by a user.

While most SEO practices focus on data, making sense of that data to understand the user’s needs is equally important. Google’s shift towards the quality of search results through its rating guidelines highlights the importance of understanding the search intent.

A good SEO strategy should give you a complete view of your target audience. It informs you about the needs of your users with insights into user behavior.

There are three kinds of search queries based on the user intent:

• Do query: The user is looking to take action—make a purchase, subscribe to email, or download an asset.
• Know query: The user is looking for information on some topic.
• Go query: The user is looking to visit a place—a nearby store or a travel destination.

Strategizing your SEO efforts around these queries will help you understand your audience better and target the right keywords.

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3. Enhances user experience and drives sales

Search engines analyze real human experiences to assess the quality of websites. So, optimal UX becomes a key component of your SEO strategy.

Here are some SEO practices to enhance your website’s user experience:

• Simplifying the navigation
• Creating easily digestible content
• Adding visual media
• Optimizing for relevant keywords
• Improve core web vitals to boost page loading speed

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Great user experience can be a game-changer for your growth. It increases your page’s ranking, drives more high-value users to your page, and enhances your conversion rate.

4. Creates long-term visibility for your brand

Unlike other marketing techniques focused on immediate outputs, SEO creates long-term results for your brand—especially in terms of visibility.

Creating quality content, optimizing it for high-value keywords, and updating it to satisfy the search intent ensures that your website sits on the top search results for a long time. As long as your website is ranking high, it continues to generate brand awareness and drive leads.

Reviewing your analytics will inform you of the areas of improvement. Use these insights to optimize your page and continue reaping the rewards of high rankings.

5. Links up with all other marketing channels

SEO should never be an afterthought of your marketing framework. It works best when integrated with your content marketing plans to amplify your brand’s reach and position you in front of new audiences across channels.

Different marketing channels can boost your SEO performance. Here are a few ways:

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• Social media: Social media supplements SEO as your online visibility places your content before a larger audience. You can distribute your content better and improve its discoverability with the strategic use of hashtags and other social media marketing tactics.
• PPC advertising: Analytics from your PPC campaign will help in determining the value of your keywords. By understanding the conversion rates for specific keywords, you can measure their significance for organic campaigns and tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.
• Email marketing: Emails help distribute all the content you create as a part of your SEO efforts. They also allow you to repurpose your older content and share it with your subscriber base, making it evergreen.

6. Maximizes the results from PPC campaigns

SEO and PPC work in correlation to gain results through search marketing. While running pay-per-click ads does not directly influence your site’s ranking, the two strategies work in sync indirectly.

By combining SEO and PPC, you can boost your presence on search engines. Optimizing your page for some specific keywords and purchasing higher PPC bids for the same keywords ensures that your page is visible on the top and secures more clicks.

Besides, if your SEO strategy does bring in a lot of traffic and potential buyers, you can run remarketing campaigns through PPC to convert a higher proportion of these leads. Remarketing is a PPC practice of reaching out to your previous website visitors to encourage them to make a purchase.

Moreover, your SEO analytics will help you identify the best keywords for running PPC campaigns. You can get the most out of your PPC investment by shortlisting keywords that drive the most traffic.

Conclusion

SEO brings the promises of organic traffic and greater visibility for every brand. However, its benefits are nowhere limited to just an optimized website.

You can center your entire marketing strategy around a well-curated SEO strategy. SEO can produce multiple benefits, from building credibility and creating brand recognition to understanding your target audience and driving PPC campaigns.

In essence, SEO can future-proof your brand and ensure long-term success. So, use the strategies discussed in this blog to shape your SEO strategy and leverage it for exponential growth.