FAQ: Why Should I Care About SEO? (4 Reasons)

“Why should I care about SEO?”

It’s a question we are frequently asked—by both clients and other business professionals who are curious about online marketing. Most people are aware of the term SEO (search engine optimization), but not everyone knows what it means or why it matters.

For a brief explanation of what SEO is, check out the SEO entry in our digital marketing dictionary.

As for why you should care about SEO, that requires a little more than just a quick definition to understand.

Here are a few quick stats:

• 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search ( BrightEdge ).
• 61% of marketers say improving SEO and increasing a company’s organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority ( HubSpot ).
• SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop ( Moz ).

These statistics alone should prove why SEO matters to businesses. But if you still need convincing, we’ve got a few more reasons why you should care about search engine optimization.

The point of SEO is that it optimizes your website’s content and helps your pages show up on Google in the most relevant searches. Unless you’re a huge brand like Apple or Nike, most consumers are going to find your business by searching for specific keywords related to your business’s services, rather than searching for your company’s name. Therefore, you want to make sure those keywords that are most used in relation to your services are prominent throughout your website, so that your website shows up when the right people are searching.

A good way to visualize the importance of SEO is to think of it as the candy right by the cash register in a grocery store. There’s a very strategic reason candy bars are placed there. Shoppers are probably tired, hungry and ready for a reward after maneuvering their way through those crowded aisles. And the longer shoppers stand there eyeing down that candy bar, the more likely they are to grab one for a post-shopping treat.

If that candy bar was in the middle of the grocery store, most shoppers would probably walk right by it. But since it’s in the right place at the right time, they’re more likely to give in.

SEO works in the same way. You want to be in front of the right audience at the right moment, which is when they’re looking for the exact services you provide.

Just like the candy bar example, showing up in the right place at the right time goes hand-in-hand with getting better quality leads. That’s because the consumers who are seeing your website are looking specifically for services like yours, and are more likely to convert into a lead.

Let’s take a look at one of our clients. Weiler's Kitchen & Bath is a home remodeling company in Pennsylvania with a specialty in kitchen design. So we optimize d their website for the term “kitchen design services, Feasterville, PA”. The people who are searching specifically for kitchen design services in Feasterville are likely ready to contact a company about these services. Therefore, if Weiler's' page comes up as a result, there’s a good chance this consumer who is ready to buy will contact them and turn into a quality lead.

When it comes to SEO, quality leads are simply a result of being in the right place at the right time.

Compared to most other marketing methods, like paid ads, SEO costs a lot less to acquire new customers. Unlike PPC, you don’t have to pay for every lead you get. Sure, there’s the cost of paying someone to manage your SEO (if you decide to go that route—which we highly recommend), but you’d have to do the same if you hired a PPC manager. And since SEO is something you want to get right, the money you spend on hiring a professionalwill be well worth the investment.

When you look at other methods of search engine marketing, SEO is really your only free option.

Chances are, most, if not all, of your competitors have already implemented SEO on their own websites. That’s why they already show up in searches you want to show up in, right?

The company Econsultancy found that in 2013, nearly half (45 percent) of all companies say content marketing was ‘highly integrated’ into their SEO efforts. And that was five years ago. Imagine how many more companies are optimizing their content for search engines now.

If your competitors are incorporating SEO in their marketing strategies and you aren’t, you’re giving them a huge advantage while simultaneously hurting yourself.

If you want any chance of showing up in search engine results, you better be optimizing your content. It doesn’t do you any good to show up in search results for a wide variety of searches. You really want to carefully choose which keywords you want to target and highly optimize your website for those few terms. That’s why SEO is a key part of any successful digital marketing strategy.