Is SEO dead?
The fact that the phrase ‘Is SEO Dead’ crops up as a Google auto-complete suggestion shows you how many people are searching for it. A few additional clicks to read a few articles also shows you just how inaccurate the search is. If search engine optimisation dies, digital marketing as an industry would die with it. In fact, SEO continues to be a vital part of branding strategies of Online businesses, especially those that seek regional and local search engine rankings.
No matter what type of business you run in the UK, you need good, managed, SEO to reach out to your audiences; by boosting sales, establishing loyal customer bases, and ensuring that your company is found online by the casual searcher and not just those who know your company name. SEO becomes your regional/local advertisement – and long term it’s probably the best Online marketing strategy you can adopt.
SEO serves regional and local marketing purposes for all types of companies – so long as you offer a product or service to customers, your company will benefit from a good, strong SEO strategy. Statistical analysis of customers shopping habits reveals that at least 50% of search engine users look for local businesses – so if they can’t find you online, you’re losing out to your competitors.
SEO will: increase your company’s visibility, create awareness of your company and its products / services, and – if done properly – can also generate leads for your business. It’s also your opportunity to create and market your company with an identifiable brand / theme that customers notice and remember and hopefully use to search for you in the future.
With good SEO, you’re going to increase traffic to your website so it’s important to ensure that your whole website is optimised and clear for end users, with a clearly defined ‘call to action’ and easy to use contact / order forms. A lot like PPC planning, you must know what you want from each user on the website and what constitutes a ‘conversion’ for you so that your SEO company can help you achieve your aims.
A good SEO company will look through every page of your website and make recommendations on every aspect to improve performance and help you to achieve the aims you’ve designed for them – it should be the case that after engaging an SEO company, their ‘first fix’ is the biggest and most complex so that they can lay the groundwork for the months that follow.
Your SEO company should be installing and using Google Analytics to determine visitor patterns and all future improvements, and it’s important that you as the company owner build up a good relationship to trust their recommendations. You may be particularly fond and proud of a certain aspect of your website, but you must prepared to sacrifice or change it if your SEO company makes the recommendation: that’s where trust and the overall relationship really come into play.
As digital markets have become densely populated and concentrated, search optimisation in the UK has proven to be the strongest technique to mitigate risk and maximise profits compared to say PPC which is much higher cost to maintain (but does have the advantage of giving you that ‘quick fix’).
Statistical analysis shows that around 92% of the online users in the UK do not search content beyond the first page of Google. Among them, at least 33% of the users visit the first website on the first search webpage. So good SEO can help you be the company that they visit first, and that’s obviously the aim of SEO – grabbing that first spot under the PPC ads that appear at the top of every search.
Find out more about how SEO could help your business long-term by checking our services page.