The Importance of Search Engine Optimization for Businesses
As both a web user and a digital marketer, search engine optimization (SEO) has become something I’m quite interested in. Through my experiences working at a digital marketing agency, learning the core pillars of inbound marketing, and executing content strategies for an array of clients, I’ve seen firsthand the impact that SEO can have on web traffic and subsequently business goals.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is the process of optimizing a website to improve its rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are a wide range of components that search engines like Google take into account when ranking results for any given search term. The criteria that are evaluated are known as ranking factors, and as search engines continue to evolve overtime, so do these factors. Additionally, companies like Google have been somewhat elusive when describing all of the factors that can rank a website’s rankings–some have been confirmed while many others are suspected.
While there are numerous considerations to bear in mind when optimizing a webpage for search, some of the most important factors to consider are the quality of your content and its relevance to the searcher’s intent, the targeted keywords you aim to rank for, content structure, page speed, and mobile friendliness. Remember that these are just a few things that have an impact on your website’s rankings–SEO is a vast topic that many marketers build their careers around.
Why SEO is Important for Businesses
Just as there are so many factors that go into SEO, there are many reasons that SEO is important and should be a core component of any web strategy.
One of the biggest reasons to invest the time and effort into SEO is that it helps to improve the discoverability of your website and its content. If your website is easily found in search, your website traffic will also be dramatically increased.
Consider this: Google processes an estimated 8.5 billion searches per pay. Additionally, 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine. In today’s digital age, anytime people have questions, they’re likely to turn to the internet for the answer. Businesses that are able to anticipate their customers’ questions, produce high quality content that answers those questions, and optimize their content in order to rank highly in search are competitively positioned to drive qualified traffic to their website in pursuit of their business objectives.
To better understand what SEO is and why it’s important, here’s an example. Harvard Business School Online provides online courses in a variety of business topics, such as Sustainable Business Strategy. The concept of the “triple bottom line” is an idea that is covered in the course and that someone who might be interested in learning about sustainable business would be interested in learning about.
Using a research tool called Semrush, we can see that this is a highly searched topic. The keyword “triple bottom line”, the targeted keyword for HBS Online’s article The Triple Bottom Line: What It Is & Why It’s Important, is searched approximately 9,900 times per month not including traffic from other variations of the search phrase.
Semrush search volume data.
After plugging this keyword into Google, a number of results are returned, including this page in the top position.
Google search results for the targeted keyword “triple bottom line.”
Given the fact that this page is the first result that someone will see when they conduct this search, they’re much more likely to navigate to the page in order to learn more about the topic. Semrush can also give us a look into the impact that this page has had on organic traffic. By ranking for the targeted keyword and over 1,000 related keywords, this one page drives over 3,200 visits to the website each month.
Semrush traffic and keyword analysis for The Triple Bottom Line: What It Is & Why It’s Important
This one example illustrates how impactful SEO can be at attracting visitors to your website. With a thorough and well planned SEO and content strategy in place, businesses can drive performance and take advantage of the vast benefits of search engine marketing.
Written by Kelsey Miller
Kelsey is a digital marketing professional with experience in a range of industries and a special interest in the higher education space.
