SEO or search engine optimization refers to the practice of improving a website’s position in the search engine results in page, particularly in the organic search results offered by search engines such as Bing, Google or Yahoo. A top ranking website gets more traffic to its pages, and more traffic leads to larger revenue. Which means that the answer to the question “have SEO and business already become inseparable?” is a definite yes, however, this relationship is shaky at best if not implemented and maintained properly over time.

Whether you get featured on the first page of search results depends heavily on what sort of business you’re in and getting the top spot and actually keeping it can prove itself to be rather difficult without a proper budget. Big brands and businesses are spending large amounts of money on optimizing their pages and competing with their budgets are next to impossible. On the other hand, offering a niche service or a product to a clearly predetermined geographical area might be the best option to get featured in the top results. Here are some of the reasons why big brands will keep investing in their SEO practices.

SEO is excellent for branding and business visibility

When someone searches for a particular product or a service, they only look at the top couple of results at best, let alone the entire fist page. Clicking on the second or the third page? Forget it. Appearing high in the search engine results page is more than just wanting to get more traffic. It’s all about the prestige and the value people put on a brand or a business for simply ranking high in the search engine results page.

Not to mention that the average user doesn’t simply search for something and that’s the end of that. Instead, they search, look at the results, edit the search terms and search again. This search process is repeated until they’ve found what they were looking for and the chances are that if your business is constantly showing up in the top of the results, no matter how much the search terms are edited, the average user will trust your website more and eventually end up clicking on it.

SEO provides businesses with credibility

People put too much faith in search engines. To elaborate further on this, more than 70% of people don’t enter the website’s address in the address bar and instead, go to Google and search for the website or business in question. And people make mental notes on what they search for and what are the results they get served with, whether they do it on a conscious or a subconscious level. In the mind of the average consumer being featured on the first page of Google or Yahoo is a big deal, and show that your business is trustworthy enough to be featured at the top.

SEO brings traffic to business

A properly executed SEO campaign will over time lead to your website appearing higher and higher in the search results. Appearing higher will lead to greater credibility and overall trustworthiness. And people like businesses they can trust. They will visit the high ranking websites more often, or write about them in forums and on social platforms and even talk about them with their friends and family. All this results in bigger traffic and larger revenues. Which brings us to the next point.

SEO delivers one of the best returns on investment in the business

SEO is considered to be a form of inbound marketing. Not to mention that traditional types of offline advertising such as email and social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising actually cost quite a lot, and unless you’re a large corporation, chances are you’ll have a hard time affording those types of marketing practices. Although social media and PPC advertising may increase your revenue and showcase your particular brand image, SEO is the backbone of securing and maintaining your online presence.

SEO is getting more and more favorable due to the fact that it remains largely invisible when compared to traditional means of marketing. The average consumer isn’t being irritated with constant interruptions while they’re listening to their favorite music, streaming the latest blockbuster or reading a news article. The beauty of SEO is that it simply makes your particular service or a product available to the consumer once and when they actually need them. It does the tedious work of getting a potential customer through your door, all you have to do is to convince them why you are the right choice for fulfilling their needs.

SEO offers unprecedented customer insight

Just like with all marketing strategies, SEO is a long term commitment. As such, it requires continual monitoring and tweaking in order for your business to become truly successful. Among the different SEO tools, none is as important and as useful like Google Analytics. It analyzes all the traffic coming to your website and monitors the complete user activity. This includes what they are searching for, where from, using what language and at which time are they most active and likely to visit your website.

Google Analytics doesn’t only show data from organic searches, but also direct traffic, referrals, social media and even paid searches. This is something big businesses could only dream of a couple of years ago. All this data provided by Google Analytics can be used to push your business in the right direction by allowing for smarter work decisions and better marketing strategies based on actual user data. But this is only a piece of the entire puzzle and must be used in compliance with other SEO practices in order to ensure the maximum results.

Bottom Line

Brands and business today depend heavily on their online presence in order to attract new ones and keep their existing customers one of the best ways of maintaining that presence is by using search engine optimization. And there isn’t a business today that isn’t using it to boost their revenues. With the latest updates to the ranking algorithm, the need to appear at the top of the results page has become a necessity and not using SEO literally means your business is falling back behind the competition.

Author bio: John Stone is a web entrepreneur and an SEO Consultant. Through years of experience, he became a devout believer in the notion that form should always follow function and that developing the ability to think outside of the box is a prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur. He currently advises companies about Web Design in Sydney. You can find him on Twitter.