Seven reasons why SEO is important for the growth of your business
You don’t need to be an SEO business to understand how important SEO is to business.
Search engine optimisation – or SEO – just makes sense. The stats show us why that is. For example, 61% of B2B marketers say that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative. 70% of online marketers say that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales, while 76% of people who search for a local business on their mobile phone visit a related business within 24 hours.
In today’s article, we’re going to build on those stats and take a closer look at why SEO is so important for the growth of your business. Let’s get started.
7 reasons why SEO is important for your business
1. Local search engine optimization
Local search engine optimisation allows smaller businesses to compete with major players by bringing in new customers who are specific to their area. Big companies can play the game too by creating local SEO campaigns to target each of the different regions that they have a physical presence in. It offers a huge opportunity that’s often less competitive than trying to compete for search terms on a national scale.

2. It’s great for both B2B and B2C
One of the major advantages of deploying an SEO campaign is that it can easily be made to work for both business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) brands. If anything, B2B brands have a slight edge because they generally tend to have the highest average customer value. This means that they can get away with a lower conversion rate as the high customer value makes it easier for them to generate a positive return on investment.

3. Searches are often transactional
When you market to people on social networking sites, you’re essentially interrupting them while they’re trying to chat to their friends and family. When you tap into SEO, you’re able to reach people when they’re already looking to make a purchase. If you run a Brooklyn pizzeria and you’re ranking first for the term “order pizza in New York City”, the people who click that link are likely to be more interested in ordering a pizza than someone in Singapore who happens to see one of your Instagram posts.
4. SEO content builds trust
SEO content builds trust and helps you to figure out different keywords to target so that you have more people coming to your website. By creating a constant stream of high quality content and optimising your pages so that it’s as easy as possible for search engines to index it, you ensure that when your target audience searches for content that relates to your industry, your website is at the top of the results. That helps to position you as the go-to company and encourages consumers to trust you and your expertise.

5. Backlinks establish your credibility
Search engines work on a citation model in which they rely heavily on the links that point to your website to determine how credible it is. The more credible the source of those links is, the more value gets passed on for you. For example, an inbound link from the New York Times would be worth more than one from your friend’s blog site. SEO isn’t about just picking up as many backlinks as you can, but rather about gathering high quality links to boost your credibility.
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6. It supports other marketing efforts
SEO can work reasonably well as a standalone strategy, but it’s at its best when it’s being used to support other marketing efforts. For example, SEO can support content marketing by helping people to discover your blog posts, videos and other content. There’s also often a lot of overlap, so for example, the keywords that you target with your SEO campaigns might also make for good hashtags to use on social networking sites.
7. It leads to a snowball effect
Because SEO sits nicely alongside your other marketing efforts, an effective SEO strategy can lead to a snowball effect where it becomes a gift that keeps on giving. Once your content starts to rank on search engine results pages, you’ll automatically attract more visitors, more shares and more inbound links.

Conclusion
Now that you know seven reasons why SEO is important to for the growth of your business, we want to hear from you. How has SEO helped you to grow your business, and where are you focusing your efforts?
Be sure to let us know in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going. Alternatively, if you’re struggling with your SEO strategy and you need a hand, why not get in touch with us to find out how we can match you with an agency partner that can help out? We look forward to working with you.