Benefits of SEO

We discussed what SEO is in our Content is King post. Now we’re going to tackle what actual benefits of SEO are. We will discuss how these benefits will help drive traffic to your website. We will then address how they will help you achieve your business goals.

Jayson DeMers wrote a great piece for Forbes titled: The Top 10 Reasons You Need SEO. I’d like to look at a few of his points and help explain them further. DeMers says, “Proper optimization not only means better rankings, it means a better user experience.” DeMers explains this further, “The search engines want to see a mobile-friendly design, good user signals (high time on site, low bounce rates, etc.) and good integration of relevant photos and videos.” Do you see what’s happening? You’re going to be rewarded for building a better website. You’re going to be rewarded for creating an experience that is enjoyable for user, but more importantly: financially beneficial to you — especially if your site’s purpose is to sell products and convert customers.

DeMers’ next point is, “Organic search may account for as much of 64% of all website visits.” He then says:

A study by Conductor of over 310 million visits to 30 different websites showed that organic search accounted for 64% of all referral traffic. While other research seems to indicate that social media has now overtaken search slightly in terms of referrals, there’s no question that search remains a critical source of traffic for most businesses.

Ok. There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s first attack the notion that social meia may overtake search.

Rand Fishkin wrote a piece for Moz titled, 8 Predictions for SEO in 2017 which addresses this. Fishkin cited a massive SimilarWeb study which analyzed Internet search traffic. Direct search accounted for 59.67% of all searches (seems people know what they want more than we think, huh?) Google accounted for 12.12% of all searches, links in email accounted for 3.06% of all searches and Facebook came in at #4 with 1.27% traffic share. That’s not to say social media isn’t a powerful tool, and specifically Facebook — because Facebook is very powerful. Specifically its ads program, which it wants you and your business to buy into. But that’s for another time.

Now that we’ve taken some ammunition out of the social media caveat, let’s get to the meat of DeMers’ point, “310 million visits to 30 different websites showed that organic search accounted for 64% of all referral traffic.” That syncs up nicely with the SimilarWeb study that found organic search at the number two spot for traffic share.

The SimilarWeb study shows us most people know what they want, and go directly to those sites. But after that, we have organic search, and SEO is our strongest solution for delivering our message to an audience who might not know our message is there.