As any company, new or old, now knows, one of your first methods of contact with customers is no longer on the street but online. People are spending the majority of their time online nowadays, with 93% of those online experiences beginning with a search engine (Google, Bing, etc.). Being able to target them through their smartphones and computers makes for an easy way to build brand awareness and attract consumers on a daily basis. Whether you’re a company that just recently created a web presence or you’ve been hosting your company online for a long time, you can further build brand awareness by optimizing your website, blogs, and advertisements with search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization, SEO, is the process through which you can target customers by utilizing “natural,” “organic” results. If you’ve ever used a search engine then you know how this works. When you search for a specific chain of terms, let’s say “local seo company Phoenix,” then the top results through the search engine are ones that contain some, if not all, of those words. While the first results on a search engine’s page will be advertisements, what are referred to as search engine marketing (SEM), the results below that are considered organic results.
While it might sound as if there are benefits to SEM, SEO brand building can prove to be more profitable. Firstly, SEO services and SEO marketing costs nothing, whereas SEM does. Moreover, 70-80% of users say that they focus solely on the organic results, ignoring the paid ads. Lastly, while you pay and bid for paid advertising spots, having your post show up isn’t guaranteed. 75% of people using search engines never scroll past the first page, so if you’re ad doesn’t get placed on the first page it might not be seen all together. If your website is instead properly optimized by SEO consulting recommendations, than you might appear further up at no cost.
While you can explore enhancing and optimizing your company’s brand awareness yourself, it can be helpful to access a professional SEO consultant. A SEO firm will first help in understanding just what it is that your business is selling, how distinct your product is, and how that can be sold, highlighted, and accessed through a search engine. Pew Internet reports that 58% of people using the internet have researched a service or product while online, so being able to directly target these people is of utmost importance.
The primary topic that will be discussed when meeting with a seo marketing firm is the way in which you can you attract internet users’ attention in brief. Three ways of optimizing this is by setting your website with a proper, optimized name, utilizing social media marketing, and optimizing your website for mobile purposes. The name of your website should feature one of the top five most used anchor texts regarding your industry, but it shouldn’t be too specific. With at least one business interacting with 70% of social media users in North America, it is important to ensure that you are reaching both your current audience as well as interested consumers. Furthermore, with one half of all local searches coming from users on mobile devices, it is paramount to ensure that your website is optimized for the web, because a user won’t stay on a poorly designed website even if it managed to be one of the first organic results through a search engine.
Whether you are a new business or old, there is a lot to be gained from ensuring that your website is properly optimized for search engine results. Digital marketing is the advertising method of the future. Be prepared and guarantee that your company doesn’t end up on the second page of a search engine’s results.
