Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a lever that offers many advantages. This marketing technique is suitable for most online businesses and brands wishing to increase their online visibility.
Whether you're a small or medium-sized business, an ecommerce website, a blog, or a showcase site, you always have the opportunity to make your mark on search engines, so why not take advantage of it?
If you're still wondering about launching an SEO strategy for your business, this list of benefits should convince you! Whether you're new to the subject or already know the basics of SEO, you can take the plunge and help make your website appear at the top of search results.
What are the top 10 benefits of SEO? Why does SEO matter?
There are many reasons to make SEO a priority for your business in today's digital age. Here are some of the most important benefits that having a great SEO plan in place can bring you.
Visibility
According to the latest estimates for 2020, Google represents more than 81,000 queries per second, 4.9 million per minute, 292 million per hour, 7 billion per day, 212 billion per month, and 2.55 trillion per year! (Source: Backlinko)
In view of these figures, the bottom line is that an SEO strategy can help you to benefit from high visibility on search engines, particularly Google. The international company accounts for approximately 85%* of market share worldwide (*Statista).
Internet users use search engines to search for a wide range of information. Behind every query lies an intent. This may be informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational.
Most of the people who carry out searches related to your field may not necessarily be familiar with your brand or your website. With an SEO strategy, you make your pages visible for keywords of interest to your business.
This enables you to attract visitors to your site and introduce them to your brand. After all, it's all very well to have an amazing website, but if no one visits it, it doesn't do you much good!
Search engine optimization therefore serves as a way to better your brand's reputation.
The various optimizations you implement will enable you to climb the rankings and position your website on the first page. It's this positioning that will enable you to attract as much organic traffic as possible.
According to Backlinko, the click-through rate on results found on the second page is 0.63%.
SEO is also an interesting opportunity for business with a brick-and-mortar location. This lever enables you to be visible in Google results to a local clientele.
With organic results and the Local Pack, you attract customers with a genuine intention to buy directly to your store.
Qualified traffic
A great SEO strategy is based on knowledge of your buyer persona and your target customers.
The pages you create will rank for relevant keywords, related to your business sector, and typed in by your audience.
Internet users who perform various searches will come across your results and decide on their own to visit your website. This is what differentiates SEO from other marketing levers such as advertising.
In SEO, people perform a search and make the decision to click on your link.
If your page responds correctly to a visitor's search intention, the organic traffic you attract is particularly qualified!
For example, if your product page is listed for "white foam longboard 9'" and the visitor performs this query, there's a good chance they'll visit your page and buy your product.
Trust, expertise, and credibility
When you surf the internet, do you feel confident about the first results that appear? Yes? You're not alone! If a search engine like Google highlights a website, it's because it seems relevant and therefore trustworthy.
By implementing an SEO strategy, you'll be able to rank your website in the first results of a large number of searches and therefore be visible to a large number of internet users!
This positioning greatly enhances your website's credibility with visitors and potential customers.
Linked to trust and expertise, improving your SEO is largely based on the creation of quality content.
Whether it's through types of SEO writing like blog articles that effectively answer questions posed by internet users, buying guides that present different products and their characteristics, detailed tutorials that provide step-by-step guidance... Your website will offer useful content for visitors.
All this content is going to enhance the perception of your brand and allow you to present the image of being an expert in your field.
To continue with the surfboard example, if your store features numerous tutorials on how to wash, store, and wax your board; comparisons to help potential customers choose their board; and several blog articles on how to improve your surfing skills, your expertise will be unquestionable!
Marketing strategy
SEO is a lever that forms part of an overall marketing strategy.By working on your website's SEO, you create content that you can re-use in different formats and share on other media. For example, a new blog post optimized for SEO can be used to publish several posts on your social networks or even be featured in your newsletter.
The organic traffic you generate every day on your site will also help to feed your different pixels (Facebook, Snapchat, X [formerly TikTok ], Pinterest, etc.). You'll be able to retarget SEO visitors to turn them into customers, even if they're basically just looking for information.
By setting up forms and lead magnets on your website, you can also collect emails from search engine visitors. This can then be followed by an email script to move them along your sales funnel to conversion.
Finally, another interesting aspect of good positioning on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is the possibility of monopolizing the top results and greatly increasing your visibility by combining SEO and SEA. When you rank in the top 3 for a target keyword, including it in your advertising efforts increases your chances of being clicked and visited. Your website will be twice as visible and easier for people to find!
Savings
The return on investment (ROI) of the various actions you implement within your business is a key point to analyze. SEO is simply the marketing pillar with the best ROI.
SEO takes time to obtain the initial results, and it often requires a financial investment (employee in charge of SEO, freelancer, copywriter, purchase of backlinks, etc.).
But once your efforts pay off and your website is attracting traffic every day, you'll benefit from a steady stream of free visitors! Unlike advertising, which disappears once you've used up your entire budget, with SEO, your page stays in position 24/7. Of course, if you want to stay at the top of the search results, you need to keep working and improving your website.
Conversion
Search engine optimization is one of the best conversion levers online! Through their search, users express a real need. They then search for answers and decide on their own to visit your website.
Behind each keyword typed lies a different search intent. There are four main categories:
- Navigational intent: the user is looking for a site or a brand.
- Informational intent: the user is looking for information.
- Transactional intent: the user is looking for a product or service to buy.
- Commercial intent: the user is looking for information about a product or service.
By creating quality pages to rank for keywords in your field, you'll attract qualified leads. If the landing pages on your website feature content that correctly responds to your visitors' search intent, you maximize your chances of conversion.
Of course, the pages that generate sales will often be those ranking for transactional and commercial queries. The final intent behind these keywords is often the purchase of a product or service.
However, this doesn't mean that informational queries should be ignored—quite the contrary! They attract visitors to your site who are looking for information in your field.
It's therefore in your interest to lead visitors through a purchasing funnel to help make them aware of your brand and your products and ultimately turn them into buyers.
Your conversion objectives for this type of content may be different: newsletter sign-up, ebook download, contact, etc.
Going back to the surfboard theme, you can also have informational queries that encourage your readers to buy your products.
For example, say that you write and share this tutorial on your website: "How to wash your surfboard: Top tips & care products." In this content, you'll highlight tips and tricks as well as a list of cleaning products you offer in your product catalog.
Sustainability
Search engine optimization is a lever that requires a certain investment before the initial results are seen. This time period is often between 6 months and a year for new sites. But unlike other levers such as advertising, the pages you work on and that rank in the search results continue to attract organic traffic over the long term.
From the moment your website is displayed in the top results, a regular check of your various kinds of SEO content (updates, competition, search intent, etc.) will help enable you to maintain a good ranking.
The other pivotal element of SEO for the sustainability of your business is the motivation generated by the first results. When you start to see your progress and your first regular visitors, it'll motivate you to work harder on your business and your site.
Every day, you'll see people visiting your pages and making purchases, which will make you want to continue investing in your project!
Sales
The main goal of any marketing strategy is to generate sales for your business and therefore increase your revenue. By improving your visibility in search engines for keywords related to your theme, you can boost your online presence and attract qualified traffic to your website.
If your site is well built and optimized to offer an enjoyable experience to visitors, shoppers will buy your products. It's therefore logical that your company's sales will increase thanks to the SEO channel.
The more you work on your SEO, ranking for as many keywords as possible in your business sector, the more sales you'll generate.
SEO is a scalable lever that allows you to create an increasing number of pages to target more and more queries and boost your company's sales.
User experience
All too often, we still hear that SEO is all about working for the search engines. But that's not the way it's been for many years!
Today, internet users must be at the heart of your SEO strategy. And that's why, when you improve your website's SEO, you also improve the user experience.
Among the various optimizations, we can mention first and foremost those linked to site content.
Every page you create must be relevant and of high quality, and it must respond to a precise search intent. Upstream SEO analysis of queries and intentions guarantees user satisfaction. People arriving on your pages will find the information they're looking for.
Text enhancement also involves regular checks to ensure that the content you offer is up to date. Here too, the visitor's experience is enhanced when they arrive on your pages and discover that the information quoted is recent.
In SEO, technical levers are playing an increasingly important role in improving the user experience.
For example, when you improve technical elements such as loading speed, removal of links that point to 404 errors, website security, or navigation tree structure, you'll be contributing to a better experience for site visitors.
SEO optimization therefore helps to boost the user-friendliness of your pages, and thus visitor satisfaction.
Measurability
Finally, SEO is a measurable lever. In other words, you can constantly measure and analyze everything.
Numerous tools such as Search Console, Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, Semrush, and many others are at your disposal to ensure that the work you're doing and the specific actions you're taking are effective.
For example, you can track your rankings for the main keywords in your field, study the conversion rate of your SEO visitors, highlight the most popular pages on your site, etc.
Data analysis is one of the keys to successfully implementing a marketing strategy and adjusting your various actions. In SEO, you have all the data at your fingertips!
After the list of pros of SEO... What are the cons or challenges?
The presence of advantages often implies disadvantages, but you'll quickly see that the drawbacks are far fewer.
Timeline
As you may have come to understand, SEO takes time before achieving the initial results. This timeline varies depending on many factors: age, competition, site health, popularity, text quality, etc.
To give you a number, on average, a new website will take between 6 months and a year before starting to effectively rank on search engines.
Depending on the CMS you use, you'll also need to implement several technical optimizations to have a healthy site that's easy to crawl by robots (robots.txt, sitemap file, pagination, breadcrumb, canonical, etc.).
Here too, these different fixes can take some time to be deployed. This is also why, on our WiziShop ecommerce solution, we're constantly working to improve the SEO of the technical foundation. By default, our 50+ ecommerce SEO tools, including, for example, a feature for managing topic clusters, ensure that your site benefits from an optimal configuration. This in turn allows you to focus on the content of your pages.
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To overcome this drawback, it's advantageous to use other marketing levers while waiting to obtain your first SEO results. For example, you can launch advertising campaigns on Google Ads or actively communicate on social networks such as X (formerly TikTok) or Facebook.
Competition
SEO is an effective lever for many website owners. This is why a large portion of publishers have already invested in search results.
Certain fields are particularly competitive and require tens of thousands of dollars in investment, as well as several years of work, to succeed in making a path.
However, this doesn't mean that you don't have a place on search engines!
During your keyword research, you'll discover different queries. You'll quickly come across very generic keywords with increased competition, but some will be more specific and more accessible. These are known as long-tail keywords.
They are less searched for but often more qualified. And above all, they allow for quicker ranking!
Another important statistic that'll prove to you that the web is full of opportunities concerns new queries typed into Google. In 2017, according to the French site Abondance, 15% of the keywords typed each day had never been searched before, and this figure is still high today.
This means that a decent number of these new requests are accessible and not yet exploited by the your competitors! Between innovations, new products, and trends, there are always possibilities.
Search engine updates
Search engines like Google are constantly evolving. To enhance result relevance and user experience, they regularly update their algorithms.
Google actually publishes the various updates on this dedicated page.
Some updates are more significant than others, such as Google Panda, which targets low-quality content, and Google Penguin, which addresses artificial link building with a focus on over-optimization of link anchors. The deployment of these new algorithms had substantial effects on the SEO community and web publishers.
It's important to note that most affected sites didn't adhere to the search engine's recommendations. By implementing best practices on your site and staying within guidelines, you have nothing to fear.
Over the years, improvements and adjustments have been the trend in algorithm changes. Thus, high-quality SEO work involves consistent monitoring and staying informed to know how to adapt to these developments. This is what makes search engine optimization both exciting and motivating!
Penalties
Closely tied to search engine updates, sites that disregard guidelines and abuse various practices can face penalties.
For instance, with the aforementioned algorithms, Panda and Penguin, the affected sites and pages are demoted in search results or even deindexed. These are algorithmic penalties.
It's also possible for certain web publishers to incur manual penalties. In such cases, it's members of Google's "quality team" who, after analyzing your site, decide to penalize you.
However, I stress that these sites largely engage in "black hat" practices, which is why they've been penalized.
Penalties should never deter you from implementing an SEO strategy. If you adhere to best practices and the right methodology, you have nothing to worry about.
The advantages and benefits of SEO are numerous. If you're seeking growth and longevity for your business, it's in your best interest to invest in this acquisition channel.
Search engine optimization is part of an overall marketing strategy and contributes to the development of each lever (social networks, email, SEA, etc).
Over time, SEO offers real value and can establish your brand as a benchmark in its niche, so why not take advantage of it?
