How SEO Impacts Your Business Part 2

People often assume that SEO will have an instantaneous effect on their business, that one day of optimisations will skyrocket their sales and make them the next Steve Jobs. But this is so far from the truth, a myth that has been created and spread by rogue agencies who cheat the system for quick results but no long term gain. Like most things, good things come to those who wait. Good SEO takes time and attention. When done properly, SEO can have lots of nice effects on your business.

Increases Visibility

Way back in 2016, we wrote a blog on how investing in SEO had affected us where we gave you an insight into how we optimised our website for search engines. We started investing in our SEO efforts and building up our websites to where it is today early on in 2014 and it has been a journey of constant change and reflection (as proper SEO should be). Over the years we have seen many a Google update come and go again, each time dramatically changing the SEO landscape.

Increasing your website’s visibility online can be a long process, as we proved in our 2016 blog post, but it is possible. By honing in on what keywords you feel are most relevant to your business and optimising your content for those and updating your website regularly with new content or improving existing content after measuring its success search engines will begin to take notice of you. And when they do, you can normally expect to see a jump in your rankings, hence increasing your visibility to potential new customers.

So we saw the effect focusing on your chosen keywords in content over a short period of time in our last blog, but does that effect continue? Well, yes it does. Take a look at how much our website has improved in performance as we have continued to build upon and improve our content:

As you can see from the graph when compared to 2014 we have seen a huge increase in traffic. This is all down to our persistence with updating content and ensuring all content is optimised around select keywords which has, in turn, jumped our rankings. As our website content has evolved over the years, we have solidified our rankings allowing us to pursue additional keywords.

Increases Conversions

Many people come to us with SEO questions claiming nothing works for them, but what they fail to realise is that SEO goes beyond writing good keywords in your content. SEO now encompasses technical and design elements and it all comes together under the term User Experience. Search engines are scarily intelligent and can actually understand the level of experience you are providing. Since search engines want to provide a better experience to users, they will direct them to websites providing a good experience. I.e. the better experience you provide to users, the better rankings and subsequently traffic you can expect to see.

Improving your user experience won’t just help your rankings though. It can have a much more direct impact on your business. With a better experience and more users, you can actually expect the number of conversions on your website to increase too. The quicker your customers can find the information they need, the quicker they can convert, the quicker you make money and the quicker your business grows. Seeing it laid out like this makes it sound like the ultraquick process so many often think it is, but it does take time and patience.

Increases Footfall

Believe it or not, well-implemented SEO can also have an impact on physical traffic to your business location. Local SEO is an incredibly powerful tool that should be utilised by every business. Not only will it help to drive footfall traffic to your premises and increase the potential for in-store sales, but it can reinforce any location-based keywords you want to be ranking for. This means your business shows up better on things like Google maps, local 3-pack listings on SERPs and for location orientated searches.

And the best thing is, it’s not very complicated to accomplish. Simply registering your business with platforms like Google My Business and Bing Maps whilst ensuring your NAP (that’s your name, address and phone number) is consistent and accurate across all of your social media profiles, website and any directory listings you may have. To reinforce these efforts you can always alter your keywords to include your location, but be careful to not across as spammy.

If you missed our first blog of this series, you can catch up here.