How SEO Could Revolutionize Your Business Website In Just 3 Months

Search engine optimization (SEO) is of vital importance to your business. We all know that ranking high on search engines, especially market dominating giant Google, means more visits to our sites, leading to new customers and more profit. Organic searches generate 51% of all visitors to websites, compared to PPC (paid search), which brings in 10% of visitors, and social media which on average yields just 5%. On average, 89% of all customers start their buying process with a search engine.)
But many businesses are still yet to jump on the SEO train. And to add to the confusion, nowadays SEO alone is not enough any more. Content marketing is hot on its heels and needs to be paired with any SEO strategy to give those eagerly anticipated ranking results.
Let’s look at some statistics on small businesses and their investment in SEO: in America only 17% of surveyed small businesses invest in an SEO strategy, but of those few, 72% claim the strategy has improved “their bottom line”. The conversion rate of 14.6% from SEO-generated leads was much higher than the 1.7% rate for outbound marketing, with the SEO-generated leads coming in at 61% less expensive than the outbound ones.
So why the hesitation towards investing in an SEO strategy for small businesses? SEO remains a mystery to most of us who have never spent any time studying and researching it. It is easy to assume that it is very time consuming to learn and that we will never be real experts. This is probably true, but even if we wish to hire an SEO agency to do just that, we still need to have a basic understanding in order to choose the right marketers and be sure that everything is done properly.
Why do you need an SEO strategy?
Why implement an SEO strategy? The strongest argument is that “leads generated through search engines are much more targeted, which means that they are more likely to turn into paying customers.”
We’ve all heard of the SEO basics such as keywords, valuable backlinks and strong, clear website structuring, but the one area where you can make a powerful impact is purposeful content. Content packed with keywords is no longer enough, Google now rewards content based on its fulfilment in regards to the search query. Instead of having content for content’s sake, creating unique pieces that provide the answer to a question will rank much higher. These pieces of content, in return, are much more likely to get shared and might create these valuable quality backlinks.
Increase your traffic in 3 months.
Investing in a comprehensive SEO strategy, strengthened by appropriate, well-crafted content, should make a noticeable difference within 6 months to a year in terms of rankings. The blog ahrefs.com claims to have increased their blog’s search traffic by 89% in 3 months. As SEO experts, the blog had a regular, consistent SEO strategy, but while traffic growth was happening, it was very slow. So they did something radical: they deleted roughly 30% of their content! The decision was based on content that was no longer standing out of the millions of daily blog posts. They conducted a ‘content audit’ on every single blog post url, getting rid of the zero view posts, and posts with poor performance metrics. They did, however, preserve any referring domains by creating 301 redirects.
So it could be time to audit your own content, removing any underperforming content that’s not optimized for search engines. Badly performing posts indicate you’re not providing users with what they’re actually searching, devaluing your rankings. Create fresh new content regularly with engaging content, focusing on the queries your website visitors will be making. Keyword research itself is important as it gives insight into what people are searching for.
Find out just how well your site is performing on SEO with a completely free SEO report from WestHost.