Realizing the benefits of SEO may take time, this is one of the reasons why many businesses may ignore it in favor of the more traditional PPC and social campaigns. Unknown to many, however, is that SEO has become imperative in determining your rank and predictions put its worth at about 80 billion dollars in the coming years. Ignoring it may be like walking through a wind storm blowing money towards you but you only pick what blows onto your face.
If you are ignoring SEO, here are seven ways this could affect your business badly and hopefully by the end of the article you will rethink your strategy.
You are Missing out on Potential Customers
SEO is able to attract a large number of customers since these days people are finding businesses through quick searches online. These customers are not just sitting there and waiting for you to open your eyes to see the SEO potential. They are indeed being directed to your competitors who already saw the light which means over the time that you are not utilizing SEO, your competitors are gaining a steady flow of customers and some of them may even be the ones you think you already have. Some of these are niche customers who you may not have realized existed and you will never if you do not embrace SEO.
Your Reputation is Being Questioned
Reputation is important in business and you do not want potential customers to doubt your reputation. When you ignore SEO, a critical number of potential clients are noticing your lack of organic presence online. Anyone can pay to be seen, but they cannot pay to be ranked, so more people trust the rankings that you achieve from getting your SEO right. SEO helps you get better ranking even if it may take time to have the desired effect. If someone searches a particular keyword and your business site is not among those that appear in the top results, even clients you already have may begin to question whether you are indeed the best.
Customers Right Under Your Nose are Walking Past You
By ignoring SEO, you are also ignoring the potential of local searches. These days local SEO is one of the most common ways people are finding businesses near them. It is not uncommon for people to drive by a business every day and yet not pay attention to it only to get their mobile device and search for a business in that area doing exactly what the business they drove past does! Other people never go out so they will not see your billboard and if you have no online presence they will not be able to find you. In essence, you are actually hiding away from potential customers by neglecting SEO.
You Could be Providing Irrelevant Content
SEO keeps you grounded on the audience needs. With SEO in place, you are aware of the popular searches and the keywords that are used more often so you design your content according to this demand. When you choose not to pay attention to SEO, however, you end up like a blind man testing the ground he is walking on with his feet and eventually could end up falling into a pit. Businesses that give the right attention to SEO tend to post content more frequently and have a wide variety of content to ensure they attract the attention of a lot more people. Their strategies help them keep in touch with the needs of the audience out there.
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Google Could Label You Untrustworthy
Did you hear about Google’s Medic Update in 2018? This update was intended to ensure that sites that show up in search results in the medical field are trustworthy and relevant. Google updated its algorithms to weed out sites that were providing content that was either irrelevant or lacking credibility. A number of sites suffered traffic lose and their rankings dropped rapidly which also made audiences lose trust in them. Businesses however that had followed SEO best practices, were able to weather the storm and bounced right back.
Google is continuing to update its algorithms and it is unpredictable which industry will be affected next. It is important that your business is providing relevant information and not just paying for visibility. SEO can help a business survive the impending storm from Google.
You are Spending More Than You Should on Building Brand Value
A business needs to build brand value in order to have customers trust and appreciate it. Using traditional channels like media ads to build brand value is expensive and the prices continue to go up. With the correct SEO strategies, you can actually spend a lot less and yet achieve impressive results. For small businesses and start-ups, SEO makes more sense since you get a better return on investment and that investment is usually minimal.
Users May be Having a Bad Experience on Your Site
User experience can determine how long a user remains on your site or if they ever come back to the site. Even with the right content, if a site does not make a user feel comfortable, they are likely to leave and never come back. This is going to increase the number of bounce backs and the search engines will eventually drop your rankings.
SEO professionals are able to improve the user experience of a site so that it is mobile responsive, that way you get more traffic from mobile users and the loading time will also improve. Often businesses make the mistake of having web designers create a site with no regard for SEO and in the end, the site looks good but takes too long to load which chases users away and into the arms of competitors who pay great attention to SEO.
In Conclusion
While some businesses seem to succeed without SEO, there is still a lot they are missing. Imagine you are a fisherman in a boat with a fishing rod, you spend the whole day fishing and you do catch quite a few fish, then picture what the results would be if you had a fishing net and spent the same amount of time fishing, how much more fish would you catch?
Including SEO in your business site is like fishing with a net instead of a rod. You are opening up the possibilities and attracting more profits when you incorporate SEO into the mix, without it, you are ignoring a big chunk of potential customers and there should be no business that is satisfied with letting customers go.
