The Single-Most Important Thing You Can Do: What You Should Know About SEO

01 Oct The Single-Most Important Thing You Can Do: What You Should Know About SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than you might think it is. A lot more important. Here’s what you need to understand.

No One Is Looking at the Yellow Pages Anymore
Back in the day, you had to look up a business or service in the Yellow Pages if you didn’t already know where to go. Nowadays, people just go online and search for what they need. On average, U.S. Internet users conduct about 12 billion searches each month. In fact, about 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. In other words, you need to be online, and turn up in the search results if you want people to find your business.

If You’re Not First, You Might as Well Be Last
The bad news is that it’s not enough to just have a website and show up in the search engine rankings. You need to be at the top of the pile. The king of the hill. Research shows that Google’s first-ranked result gets a staggering 33% of the search traffic. Second gets 18%, and third only gets 11%. From there on out, it drops exponentially. About 75% of people, in fact, never even scroll past the first past the first page of search results.

It Works
Here’s the thing about SEO — it works. Ranking well online really does lead to more sales. Research shows that organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate. That might not sound all that great, but outbound marketing leads — ones gained from cold calling and the like — only have a 1.7% close rate.

If you want to start putting your website to good use, work with an SEO company on your site’s web design, and get some digital marketing strategies going. Otherwise, you’re going to lose out on a lot of business.

If you have any questions about SEO, feel free to share in the comments.