Five Advantages of Search Engine Optimisation

Posted by Grew Dull on May 9th, 2017

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the management of the content, design and structure of a website in order to improve its presence on the most common search engines, such as Google and Bing.

SEO is a vital marketing tool for many modern businesses, and for many companies it is needed simply in order to keep up with their competitors. For example, take the search term, ‘estate agents Birmingham’, an SEO agency Birmingham can help estate agents match, and hopefully out perform, their competitors in the city when it comes to their web presence.

Here we take a look at five of the main benefits of SEO.

Increased site traffic.
Links on the first page of the results of a search receive much more traffic than links on page two onwards. Similarly, links at the top of the first page get much more traffic than those at the bottom. SEO aims to get the target website as far up the search results as possible in order to improve the number of visits to that site.

However, it’s not only the position of the search results that matters: the quality of the meta descriptions and title tags also affect the click rate. SEO improves the quality of the text displayed to the potential customers, which has the effect of encouraging more of them to click through to the target site.

Return on investment.
The beauty of SEO is that its every aspect is trackable and quantifiable. SEO agency Birmingham can track increases in conversions, traffic and rankings and, by using comprehensive analytical software, they can also collect lots of other information about those clicking through to a website, such as their demographics for example.

SEO companies can also trace the path of customers to Ecommerce sites, from the initial keyword used to find the site, right up to the final sale. For non-Ecommerce sites, SEO agencies can use values such as ‘contact us form fill-outs’ to assess the effectiveness of an optimisation strategy.

If the ROI is less than the customer requires, the strategy can be adjusted, re-analysed, adjusted again, and so, until the ROI reaches a satisfactory level.

Cost effectiveness
SEO can be extremely cost-effective because it directly targets a group of users that are actively searching for your online services and products. In other words, much of the hard work has already been done for the owner of the website. This makes SEO much more cost-effective than other, ‘scatter gun’ marketing approaches, such as cold-calling. On average, leads generated by cold-calling cost around 60% more than those generated by a more targeted strategy, such as SEO.

Taking our example keyword, ‘estate agents Birmingham’, an SEO agency Birmingham is now targeting a group of users that have already specified the type of business, and its location, that they are interested in. This makes it much easier to encourage those users to click through to the optimised site.

Improved site functionality
SEO involves rearranging a site’s links and architecture in order to make it more navigable for the major search engines. A very valuable ‘side effect’ of this improved structure, is that a website also becomes easier for human visitors to find their way around and find the information or products they require.

Improved brand awareness.
A website that appears in the top positions of a search gets many more impressions than those further down the list. So even if a user doesn’t click on the link on that occasion, the brand has still been displayed to them and brand exposure is never a bad thing.

Additionally, brands that appear in those precious top slots are generally perceived by users to be more trustworthy and established than those in the middle or bottom positions. Over time, users come to associate certain keywords with those brands and more direct traffic to the website is generated.

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