According to a recent 2018 survey by International Telecommunication Union, there are more than 4.2 billion active internet users globally. The same report indicates that more than half of the global population has access to the internet most of whom live in developing countries.
With that in mind, more than 93% of online related activities begin on a search engine where close to 40,000 searches are conducted every second which loosely translates into more than 3.5 billion searches per day.
These staggering numbers present your business with endless opportunities in terms of being found on search engines by your customers.
But what if your business’s website is buried deep in the cyberspace world and your customers can’t find it? It means million lost opportunities.
How then do you avoid this nasty experience?
Well, if you know a thing or two about SEO, you can personally try and overhaul your website by optimizing it.
However, if you are hearing about SEO for the first time, it would make sense to hire an SEO company to help you.
Definition of SEO
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization and it’s the practice of organically augmenting the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic through search engine results.
The primary goal of SEO is to marshal the search engine spiders to locate your site and pages and respectively rank them all pegging on their relevance so they can occupy the top spot on the search engine results. Although it may sound straightforward, it’s an ongoing process that requires constant maintenance, tuning, testing, and monitoring.
What Makes Up Good SEO?
As indicated above, SEO is an ongoing process. For this reason, you need to have indicators that help you determine what will work and what won’t just cut it. There are three major indicators of good SEO.
Quality of Traffic
Your website can garner all the traffic in the world. However, if Google is telling your site visitors that your website sells Apple phones whereas you are an apple farmer in France, that doesn’t constitute quality traffic. Instead, you want your site to draw a relevant audience that is interested in the products you are offering.
Quantity of Traffic
As soon as you have the right audience clicking through the search engine results pages, more traffic at this point is better.
Organic Results
Paid ads constitute a significant portion of the search engine results pages. However, with organic traffic, you get to benefit without paying in form of ads.
Off to the big question now…
How Can Hiring an SEO Company Help Boost Your Leads?
Most startups and SME’s are constantly facing financial constraints. More than often, marketing departments are hard hit as they aren’t seen to interrupt the service delivery of a business.
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find a business owner doubling both as the owner and marketing manager. Over time, such a strategy may fail to yield results, leaving business owners wondering whether there is a better way.
And what a better way than hiring an SEO firm to do the heavy lifting for you?
Here are a few benefits of hiring an SEO company:
They Assist in Getting Better Results
As earlier indicated, it’s almost impossible to survive as a business in this digital era with a lethargic online presence. In the early days of the internet, only a few industries that had stiff competition needed SEO to elevate their websites to the SERP’s top spot. Fast forward to today, there is competition in every industry making SEO a necessary tool to reach out to existing and potential leads.
Having a website is one thing. But having a website that converts is a whole different ball game. Occasionally, a few tweaks can help break your page’s ranking from the silo. But perhaps the biggest dilemma is having a relatively good ranking website that doesn’t convert– visitors casually browsing and bouncing to next website without buying anything.
In such instances, you can hire an SEO company to conduct a thorough SEO audit to troubleshoot the gaps in your ongoing SEO campaigns. They should also be able to help you implement crucial SEO aspects to improve your website’s visibility at the same time save you supplementary marketing costs.
Knowledge and Expertise
SEO is more than reading online blogs and listening to podcasts. Whereas you may have the basic SEO knowledge, your experience in terms of implementing the actual strategy may be insufficient. Sounds familiar?
As a business owner, you shouldn’t place your business on the chopping board by taking uneducated stabs in the dark. For lack of a better word, it can be likened to participating in an expired charity.
Experimenting with your website’s SEO could actually cause more harm than good. For instance, link building has and can certainly help in your rankings and authority, but a simple mistake of incorporating the wrong links could see your website getting de-ranked— that is if you are lucky not to be knocked off from the search engine results.
SEO companies know how to navigate this murky environment by making smart decisions thanks to the accumulated knowledge and experience. The end result is increased ranking, visibility, and conversions without having to slave figuring out things on your own.
Up-to-date New Trends
On any given day, Google regularly updates their search algorithm. This makes it almost impossible for busy marketing executives to keep close tabs on what is happening and implement real-time changes as the situation requires.
By partnering with an SEO company, you are assured that there is someone to take care of these unexpected changes smoothly and quickly. For instance, in August 2018, Google’s Core Search algorithm update took a huge swing on Health and Medical Sites. The less prepared website owners watched as their traffic tanked which led to unprecedented outrage and loss of business.
Having an SEO firm by your side gives you the benefit of knowing precisely when such updates are due to be dished out and ensure you are prepared.
Cost Effective
You may spend a fortune trying to optimize your site for even the slightest organic search. However, without a plausible degree of expertise in SEO, you could as well be building a house on a shaky foundation.
For your SEO strategy to be worthwhile, there needs to be consistency. An SEO company individually diagnoses website pages treating them as potential campaigns and optimizes them in isolation to target customers at all the buying cycle levels. By implementing these on-page and off-page strategies, your website builds a naturally occurring online profile that is appealing to customers.
Validating your Website’s HTML Code
This may come like a no-brainer suggestion but it’s absolutely important. Although Google and other search engines don’t consider the correctness of your site’s HTML code, they are primarily guided by the correctness of same to determine the web pages ranking index. As such, an SEO company can help you correct your HTML code if it contains errors ensuring that every section of your site counts in the search engine’s database.
Improves Return on Investment
If you are to invest your money of an inbound marketing strategy, it is important that you do it the right way in order to realize the returns. By working with a company whose single-most emphatic allegiance is to deliver specific and measurable goals, you are essentially enhancing your brand recognition, improving your return on investment, and saving other resources that you would have gone into the project had you personally done the work.
Generating Easy-To-Digest Reports
When working on your website’s SEO, it’s important to be able to generate reports and analyze them to determine the impact of your strategy. By so doing, you’re able to identify what is working and what is not, plus identify new opportunities or apparent threats from your competitors.
An SEO company will help you make sense of the statistics and consequently using them as business intelligence.
Analyzing of Results
Irrespective of how you advanced your SEO strategy is, it can only make sense if you are able to condense and localize the results. An SEO company worth their salt helps you by regularly analyzing the results and recommending the right dose of changes.
Some of the common metrics they can help in monitoring include;
- Website visits emanating from the search engines.
- Your website ranking in relation to the phrases being searched.
- Search queries related conversion rates.
- A slack in your website’s search traffic.
In Conclusion
Sometimes, putting two heads together to brainstorm about your SEO strategy is important. You get to work with individuals brave enough to boldly point out serial mistakes you may have been making without fear of retribution—which is normally rare when working with an in-house team. That notwithstanding, you also get to learn from people who are solely dedicated to helping you and your company reap the online opportunities by helping your site rank. After all, most customers are purchasing online more than ever.
