A lot has changed in the marketing space since the popularisation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, but one thing has remained remarkably steady since then: the importance of effective search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO is the broad banner for a series of practices – including both on-site and off-site measures – designed to boost websites’ search engine rankings for relevant search terms.
It may seem easy enough, in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, to argue that we are becoming an increasingly ‘digital-first’ world. Data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), for instance, indicate that Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales in Great Britain reached 28.1% in October 2020, compared to just 19% as recently as February.
But the same trend graphs also show that even the coronavirus pandemic has simply accelerated a much longer-term transition, cementing what was already the ever-greater primacy of SEO in the marketing strategies of organisations around the world.
SEO helps to place your digital ‘shop window’ front and centre
In a world in which billions of searches are performed on Google alone – never mind the other leading search engines – every day, SEO is imperative for any business looking to market itself effectively in 2020.
That’s because, in 2020, it remains crucial for brands to generate healthy and targeted organic traffic. Your organisation’s website is as powerful a ‘shop window’ as even the most high-profile high-street presence it may have. It is a key frontier for making a positive first impression on prospective and current customers or clients, and building your brand’s authority in its industry.
Whether someone lands on your website in search of information about specific products or services, or to seek your expertise on a particular subject, SEO is as exceedingly far-reaching a marketing discipline as it has ever been.
That is especially the case given all of the data about visitor behaviour that your website also generates, encompassing key metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, referrals, downloads and sales. The insights brought by these parameters can then be fed back into your SEO campaigns as you come to better understand and cater to your target audiences through search marketing.
Build your brand’s relevance, authority and leads through SEO
The competition between brands online has never been tougher. Millions of users are searching each day for the products, solutions and knowhow that will make their lives easier, and they’re routinely willing to pay for it. But with there now said to be more than 1.7 billion websites online, SEO is key to ensuring potential customers see your brand before they see that of a competitor.
Few of these human users have the time and the attention spans to look beyond the first few results in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for their particular query. And if your brand does feature among those initial results, it’ll signal that you are a trustworthy, credible and relevant source of the products, information or assistance the searcher requires.
That, in turn, translates into the well-targeted traffic and revenue that is the lifeblood of brands in almost every sector. It’s all the more reason for your brand to reach out to an SEO consultant in Essex who has a track record of consistently delivering positive ROI for his many UK-wide clients.
To request your free SEO audit that will help your own business to gain the best results from its involvement in this marketing discipline that remains as influential as ever, don’t wait any longer to get in touch with Ink Digital.
