The very short answer to this question is yes. Yes, you do. Why do you really need SEO? Let me answer this question with a series of questions to you:
- Do you want traffic on your business website?
- Do you want highly targeted, highly interested traffic coming to your business website?
- Do you want this traffic consistently, every day?
If you answered yes to these questions, then you have pinpointed exactly why SEO is crucial for your business.
Somewhere out there on the internet, there are people, probably many people, with a fistful of dollars, eager to buy your products and services. But those people have to find you before they can fork over their dollars. That’s what SEO offers you. SEO, not a thing so much as a set of best practices, helps you reach those customers most willing to buy your products and services. It helps you put your business in front of the people who are looking for what you have to offer.
Think of your business as a physical product. If you were going to put your product in a store, you would want it to be very visible. You would want it placed in several areas throughout the store on shelves right at eye level. In short, you would want shoppers to see it right away and not have to go searching high and low. Search engines, Google being the most familiar one, work in much the same way. Google doesn’t deal in physical products, but in key words and key word phrases. When people search for key words and phrases, Google helpfully returns a list of websites that are most relevant to those searches.
Piece of cake right? SEO is a little trickier than just saying, “Well I sell flowers, so I’ll add the keyword flowers to my website.” Lots of people sell flowers. I mean lots and lots and lots of people sell flowers. Consider this:
- There are scads and scads of websites. In fact, there are millions of sites with billions of pages.
- Any keyword or phrase search returns only 10 websites per page, in order of relevance (determined by the rules of that search engine).
- According to Chitka Insights, about 94% of search engine users do not go past the first page of results.
So do you really need SEO? If you want interested customers to find your website and your products and services, the answer is you can’t succeed without considering SEO.
SEO might sound a little scary at first, but there are some very basic principles that can help you increase your visibility to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. With a few simple tools and a set of SEO best practices, you can increase your visibility and appear in relevant searches to an interested, targeted, and motivated audience.
