What’s surprising in light of these statistics is that not all companies value SEO. Some don’t think it’s important at all. And then there’s the group that thinks they need it but don’t understand what SEO is.
To help you determine SEO’s place in your business, this blog takes you through the high-level basics. You may discover you don’t need SEO at all. But if you do, it can be a powerful asset in your marketing toolbox.
Do You Really Need SEO?
As the Director of SEO at R2i, perhaps I should not say this, but the answer is probably. SEO improves your website’s health, performance, and search visibility. If these things are important to your business, SEO is important to your website.
Need more reasoning than that? SEO or organic search is almost always your top channel for driving traffic to your website. And then consider that the traffic you get is free; you do not pay for it!
Search engine marketing and paid searches are also extremely important to your overall marketing strategy. But organic search marketing drives the many different search engine results you see saturating the first page of Google. If you want to be found in these fancy results, consider an organic strategy.
Remember to E-A-T
Many people don’t understand how SEO works. The key is for your website content to achieve the
E-A-T trilogy:
• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust
The Google search engine looks for content with these attributes and shows preference to the brands who achieve it. If your brand is the expert in your field, the authoritative source of information, and is trustworthy, you will want to show that to your users in the content you provide and within your on-page attributes.
This is key because SEO done well establishes a strong foundation. The work you put into your website—designing an effective user experience, writing great content, and providing a clear path to conversion—are all things that cannot perform well on a broken foundation. Technical SEO is all about finding any issues inhibiting site performance and resolving them for a strong, solid foundation.
Are There Companies That Don’t Need SEO?
Yes…if your company has a product that no one knows they should be searching for, then there is no need to create a keyword strategy around it. And if you need results like right now, there are other channels you will want to look at first. That’s because good SEO takes time, and time isn’t a luxury everyone has.
You also may not need SEO if you have a content management system (CMS) that isn’t SEO-friendly. Or worse, if you have a homegrown CMS that doesn’t allow certain SEO elements to even be implemented.
For example, I recently spoke to a large manufacturing client who told me their CMS didn’t allow for canonical tags, no-index tags, or schema. Many other fancy e-commerce CMS solutions also add unnecessary folders to URLs or don’t allow for custom navigation.
If this is this is the case at your business, I would suggest you think about a CMS upgrade and check out the Adobe Experience Cloud Webinar for some ideas on how to get started. Upgrading your CMS can help you with more than just your SEO. SEO is clever and can find workarounds for almost anything. But a CMS that doesn’t play nice is something even the most seasoned SEO will have a hard time navigating.
Help Customers Find You First
SEO isn’t immediate. It isn’t flashy. But it does provide a great ROI when done right. And most likely, your competitors are doing it. Applying SEO to your website content will help you keep pace with your competitors and improve your chances that customers will find you first!
In our next SEO blog, we look at the impact that website navigation, architectures, internal linking, and user experience have on search rankings. And if you’re looking to find out how SEO can drive more traffic to your website, contact R2i today.
About the author: Brittany Nowlin
As the Director of SEO at R2i, Brittany Nowlin loves all aspects of SEO, but her expertise lies in technical SEO and creating sound website foundations for housing strategic content. Brittany has over ten years of helping clients in capturing search engine real estate while also driving real business results from organic search for industries such as fashion e-commerce, higher education and healthcare. She also brings a deep knowledge of user experience—with a passion for understanding what the consumer wants and needs, and making that a reality. Brittany’s favorite challenge in her day-to-day life is helping her clients build dialogues with their users through her ability to analyze and use data to drive recommendations and results.
