What is SEO And How it Can Help My Business?

There are countless articles on the internet, explaining what SEO is, but a lot of them are very frightening and contain too much jargon for the non-professional. This article is written for our potential clients and our interns. You will learn what is SEO, how it can help your business and how to start. Anyone without knowledge or expertise could benefit from reading this piece, and not feel intimidated by it.

What is SEO?

SEO consists of activities that help your website rank on search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), and drive relevant visitors to your site. It stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. You don’t actually optimize the search engines, but instead you are improving the things that search engines observe when determining the quality of a website, and it’s positions in search results.

This leads us to the bare bones of the SEO:

On page factors – what search engines see ON your site
Off page factors – what search engines see on your site from the other sites
User factors – how users behave when they come to your website.

In order to rank your website post 2016, you need to tackle all three of these factors and have them taken care of. Competition can be fairly fierce. And your site needs to provide actual value to the user, meet the search engine expectations as well as the visitors expectations. Some lucrative industries are saturated with SEO-ed businesses and websites. So before you dive into an industry, it would be wise to consult with a digital marketing agency or consultancy, on whether it is feasible to breach into the market, and at what price.

Why do I want to do SEO?

Because those visits are the closest ones to contributing to the bottom line. Search engines can send the most relevant and high quality traffic to your site. Better than any other channel out there. This means that the traffic that is coming your way has one common point: user intent. User intent can help you expose your business to the clients right when they are expressing the desire for your products or services. This means that SEO is highly performance based marketing. And in numerous cases, once rankings are achieved, it is fairly predictable.

This means that companies that do SEO are capable to generate very high revenues at low advertising expenses (relative to the revenue generated).

However, SEO drives numerous risks, like acts of manual penalties, search engine algorithm changes, competitors driving a higher budget campaign and tanking your rankings. This means that SEO is a zero sum game. Every time you rank somewhere, it means that you are pushing away your competition from the table.

That is one of the reasons why you want to do SEO, you want to secure the positions away from your competitors, and drive qualified customers to your physical or online store.

When is SEO good for my business?

SEO isn’t cheap, and most SEO projects require substantial cash flows, that may not be available to all the businesses. While numerous ways to rank are technically free, understanding the value behind “free activities” will yield insignificant results, and may take too much of a learning curve in order to produce results.

In order to position yourself in the search engines you will need resources and patience. For any decent SEO results to start happening, you need to wait for quite some time. Some results are happening within 3 months, while substantial results may come after 6 months, a year or even more years. That depends on your industry and SEO competition. SEO competition is something that should be determined prior to you making a decision whether you want to move forward into an industry.

Learn more about the pricing of SEO here, and running values of these services. One of the great things about SEO is its predictability. Cult Of Traffic is offering numerous Digital Marketing Business Planning services that yield great strategic advantages, like understanding the return on the investment down the road, and estimated investment into the project.