If you go by the common-sense advice available online, it’s easy to believe that SEO is all about sales, sales, sales.
But there is more to a good SEO strategy than just helping your business generate more leads increase your profits — although, of course, both of those are desirable outcomes as well.
Here’s what SEO can do for your business, besides boosting your sales numbers.
1 – Improve user experience
It’s not a coincidence that many of the principles that make for a good SEO strategy also help businesses build better, more user-friendly websites. Google and other search engines have one primary goal at all times: to provide good results to all search queries made by users. As such, they’re constantly tweaking their algorithms so it’ll encourage behavior that leads to good websites and content, and punish behavior that leads to users being misled and frustrated.
This is also why you should be suspicious of any SEO guru who claims they can make your site rank higher by doing things that make your site less useful to the average user.
2 – Build your credibility
These days, if you want to know if a brand is legitimate, the first thing you do is look them up online. Making sure that your site ranks high and is easy to find will help your brand earn the trust of customers, suppliers, potential employees, and anyone else you wish to do business with. If your site is not the top result when someone looks up the name of your company, that doesn’t inspire confidence.
3 – Expand brand awareness
Content marketing is becoming one of the most popular SEO strategies, and it comes with several advantages. One of them is that when users visit your site and read a useful article there, it helps get them in touch with your brand. Even if that customer doesn’t end up making a purchase, having regular visitors help build awareness of your brand, which can lead to more business and opportunities down the line.
Regular readers can also help establish your brand as an authority in your industry, especially if you write content based on the experience of industry experts. Be them your own experiences, of that of the writers you hire.
4 – Find areas for optimization
Working with an SEO agency or using an SEO audit tool can help you identify areas in which your site is lacking optimization. Your site might need to be more mobile-friendly, need to reduce its loading speeds, or it might need to be more easily searchable. Whatever the case, these are issues one might miss if they aren’t working with tools that focus on boosting a site’s SEO.
5 – Draw users to your physical store
If you have a physical location on top of a website, a good SEO strategy can help improve foot traffic for your store. Customers are growing accustomed to looking up local businesses online before they even get out of the house, which means that if your competition is more visible on online maps than you are, you’ll be at a steep disadvantage from the word go.