The Importance of SEO | Search Engine Optimization | AE (2023)

The Importance of SEO | Search Engine Optimization | AE (1)

With the calendar turning over to 2023, it’s time to fully understand, accept, and embrace the importance of SEO for growing your business. While you’ve probably heard that SEO, or search engine optimization, is a useful and necessary digital marketing tool, you may not be exactly sure what SEO entails in this day and age—or why it matters so much in the first place.

This guide breaks down what search optimization is, the importance of SEO for sustainable growth, and how to implement best practices so that your brand is more discoverable than ever online.

What Is SEO?

SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. A higher ranking when someone searches a term in your industry increases your brand’s visibility online. This, in turn, gives you more opportunities to convert qualified prospects into customers. When done correctly, SEO can help your brand stand above others as a trustworthy company and further improve the user’s experience with your brand and website.

Why Is SEO Important?

SEO is important for brands as it’s a highly effective way to improve your brand’s visibility through search, drive more traffic to your website, establish your brand as a trusted authority in your industry, sustainably and reliably grow your business, and much more. Here’s how each of these factors contributes to the importance of SEO for your brand.

Visibility and Rankings

When searching for a service or product online, users are more likely to choose one of the top five suggestions that the search engine shows them. SEO helps you rank higher in search results and garner more visibility online, making potential customers more likely to click over to your site and convert.

Web Traffic

To put it simply—if potential customers can’t find your website, you miss out on sales opportunities. SEO increases your organic search engine traffic, in turn increasing the number of visitors your website sees each day. This directly correlates to an increase in sales—because the more relevant people see your site, the more likely you are to sell to them.

(Video) The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Trustworthy

The better optimized your site is, the higher you’ll appear on search engines like Google and Bing. While ranking higher on Google is appealing to all brands because of increased visibility, a secondary benefit is the trust you gain with potential customers. Users tend to defer to the recommendations that a search engine generates, so having a higher position for the keywords a user is searching for will, in turn, solidify your product or service as trustworthy in the user’s mind.

User Experience

A well-optimized website clearly communicates what product or service is being offered, shows how to obtain it, and answers any questions surrounding it. User experience is a major ranking factor for Google. This means that by catering the site to appeal to search engines like Google and Bing, you’re also catering it to the user’s experience. This means both search engines and users are able to easily get the information they need. On the other hand, if a user struggles to navigate your site, chances are that search engines will as well.

Growth

There’s no doubt about it—SEO carries a lot of importance for the growth of your brand. As we mentioned above, the higher you rank on a search engine for a variety of high-volume keywords, the more organic (aka non-paid) web traffic your site will receive. It’s as simple as that.

A website that is well optimized is more likely to gain more customers and make more sales. People are also more likely to then share your brand across other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram once they’ve found your website through a search engine.

What Are the Main Elements of Search Engine Optimization?

On-site SEO

On-site SEO refers to the improvements to be applied to the content on your site to ensure that it’s search engine friendly. When optimizing your website for search engines, you want to signal to search engines exactly what each webpage is about in a variety of ways.

With on-site SEO, you’ll deal with the structure of your website, adding keywords to various portions of each page. Some of the key areas of attention when it comes to on-site search engine optimization are:

  • Keyword selection
  • Content optimization
  • SEO titles and meta descriptions
  • Linking structure
  • Image alt attributes

This is far from an exhaustive list, but let’s take a look at each item.

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Keywords

In the same way that it’s hard to understate the importance of SEO for your brand, it’s also difficult to overstate the importance of the keywords you choose when it comes to the success of your SEO efforts.

Picking the right keywords for your website and content takes diligent research, and it’s critical to aim for the sweet spot of high relevance + high volume ratings + low competition. At Alter Endeavors, we offer an SEO Foundational package when building sites that leans on extensive keyword research to ensure the language used across the site includes high-volume keywords relevant to your industry.

Content

The content you choose to write and share on your website is essential to reaching and engaging with your audience. Say you owned a window treatment business, like our client Austintatious Blinds does. To increase your visibility in that industry, we’d suggest a series of blogs exploring the types of window treatments, from modern window treatments to smart home automation through motorized blinds, etc.

So, when a local user searches a question concerning a type of window treatment, your blog shows up. This allows you to start a conversation with a potential customer by providing them valuable information that they are actively searching for. And when they’re ready to purchase their new window treatments, who will be the first to come to mind? You! Your content should be educational, engaging, and shareable.

Meta Descriptions and SEO Titles

When Google puts together search engine results pages (or SERPs) to display to a user following their search, it doesn’t display entire webpages. Instead, it provides a curated snapshot of information (called a “snippet) to represent each page that shows up in results.

The main portions of the snippet are the SEO title and meta description. For example, when you search for “alter endeavors,” here’s how our homepage appears on the SERP:

The Importance of SEO | Search Engine Optimization | AE (2)

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Importantly, while search engines can automatically generate SEO titles and meta descriptions, they also allow you to set them yourself. This is a golden opportunity for you to include crucial keywords related to your business and improve the ranking of your pages for various queries.

Internal and External Links

Good linking structure is important for both user experience and SEO (which, as we’ve covered above, are closely related). When you link from one page to another on your site that has related and relevant content, you make it much easier for users to find what they need. When Google crawls your pages, it also follows the various links you include in your content. These internal links help Google to more easily navigate your site, and links between pages help to spread the SEO love across your entire website, so to speak.

External links, on the other hand, are all about demonstrating authority. Trust is a major factor for Google, and Google considers sites more trustworthy when they link to (or are linked from) other trustworthy, authoritative sites. While getting other websites to link to your own is a more involved process (which we’ll touch on later), including links to other sites (ideally not your competitors!) is very helpful for SEO as well!

Image Alt Attributes

Google looks at much more than the words you see to determine the relevance of a page for each user’s search query. In addition to things like meta descriptions and SEO titles, which aren’t displayed on the actual page of your website, Google also considers things like image alt text.

An image’s alt attribute is text associated with the image that describes the content of the image itself. This serves two main purposes: if an important image on your site won’t load, the text will tell the user what’s supposed to be there. Additionally, if a visually impaired user is scrolling through your site, a screen reader will be able to read the alt text to describe the image instead.

There’s an important balance to be struck here between optimizing alt text for Google and improving accessibility and user experience. HubSpot has an excellent article on how to write good alt text.

Local SEO

If you own a local business that only serves the Austin area, your website is not ranking in other cities for most high-value terms. Search engines pull the user’s location to make suggestions that are within a certain range so that they can make a quick decision rather than sort through businesses that are nowhere near them at that point in time. So, if someone wanted to find the best sushi in town, they’d do a quick Google search, browse the top results around them, and make their decision.

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Conversely, this means that if your business isn’t showing up as a top result when it should be included, users are probably taking their business elsewhere.

Ways to improve your local SEO include using local keywords (i.e. those that include your city or service area), claiming your directory listings, and creating pages for your businesses on platforms such as Google My Business and Google Maps.

Off-Site SEO

Off-site search engine optimization techniques involve efforts made on websites outside of your own to push your own ranking higher. The key element to off-site SEO is link building or “backlinks,” which is an effort to have other reputable, high-traffic websites link back to your site.

Backlinks are a signal of trust to search engines and they can play a huge part in your ranking position. Ensure that the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites and your ranking will be positively affected. Don’t try and trick the search engine into recognizing bad links, using “black hat” tactics, because more likely than not, you’ll get penalized and potentially banned from search engines.

Alter Endeavors Can Get You on the Path to SEO Success!

After overviewing what search engine optimization is, why it’s important, and how to implement it, keep in mind that SEO should be treated as a positive practice with long-term benefits, not an exact science with immediate results. Your rankings strongly depend on who you are competing with, including the size of the company, years in business, and their own on- and off-site SEO efforts.

These tips on how to improve your SEO should help you get the ball rolling, but improving your digital presence is an ever-changing task. Luckily, with an agency like Alter Endeavors on your side, you can leave keeping up with Google to our experts! We offer multiple services to improve search traffic to your site, including our SEO Foundational to establish a strong baseline of traffic and Ongoing SEO to build momentum and expand your audience.

If you have any questions or are looking to build a sturdy marketing bridge for your brand in 2023, we’d love to chat about how SEO fits in.

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FAQs

Which of the following are benefits of search engine optimization SEO ):? ›

why SEO is simply awesome.
  • SEO Benefit #1: Increase Quality Traffic to Your Site.
  • SEO Benefit #2: Generate a Higher ROI.
  • SEO Benefit #3: More Cost-Effective.
  • SEO Benefit #4: Improve site usability.
  • SEO Benefit #5: Promote Brand Awareness and Credibility.

What is the impact of search engine optimization as a marketing tool? ›

SEO has a significant impact on the ranking of content and websites in search engine results, by improving awareness among users for specific content, and even greatly enhancing the market share for the products (Bhandari & Bansal, 2018; Lewandowski, Sunkler & Yagci, 2021;Akram et al., 2010).

What are the three main benefits to SEO? ›

Top 8 SEO Benefits
  • SEO Benefit 1: Brings Organic Search Traffic to your Website.
  • SEO Benefit 2: Generates Leads Cost-Effectively.
  • SEO Benefit 3: Increases Brand Awareness.
  • SEO Benefit 4: Gets You Ahead of the Competition.
  • SEO Benefit 5: Optimizes Your Website for Mobile Users.
  • SEO Benefit 6: Builds Trust.

What are the top 10 benefits of SEO? ›

The Top 10 Benefits of SEO for Your Business
  • SEO Increases Organic Discovery & High-Quality Website Traffic. ...
  • SEO Offers Impressive ROI. ...
  • SEO Improves Credibility & Trust. ...
  • SEO Provides 24/7 Promotion. ...
  • SEO Targets the Entire Marketing Funnel. ...
  • SEO Reaches Your Entire Target Audience. ...
  • SEO Optimizes User Experience.
Aug 18, 2020

How effective is Search Engine Optimization? ›

Yes, SEO really does work. SEO is essential for organic online growth and if you do it right, you'll have an incredible number of internet users find your website quickly. This increases brand awareness and the chances that these users convert to customers.

What 4 pillars are important in SEO? ›

The four pillars of SEO
  • technical SEO: How well your content can be crawled and indexed.
  • content: Having the most relevant and best answers to a prospect's question.
  • on-site SEO: The optimization of your content and HTML.
  • off-site SEO: Building authority to ensure Google stacks the deck in your favor.
Nov 1, 2017

What is the primary purpose of SEO? ›

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website.

What are the five important areas of SEO optimization? ›

Each of these should be on your radar and a part of your overall SEO strategy.
  • Content. Certainly, content is king. ...
  • User Engagement. Ultimately, we design websites for both people and search engines. ...
  • Technical Structure. ...
  • Interlinking. ...
  • Mobile Optimization.
Sep 21, 2021

What are the two main points of SEO? ›

SEO is divided in two parts: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to all techniques that can be implemented on your website to improve your ranking in SERP (search engine results pages), whereas off-page SEO refers to everything that can be done outside of your website to improve its visibility on the web.

What are the strengths of SEO? ›

Benefits of SEO for small business
  • Brings in more customers through organic search. ...
  • Creates a trustworthy web experience for customers. ...
  • Encourages you to focus on user experience. ...
  • Improves brand awareness. ...
  • It helps keep you informed. ...
  • It can be done on a budget. ...
  • It's trackable. ...
  • It benefits other marketing initiatives.
Feb 25, 2021

What improves Search Engine Optimization? ›

Taking these steps can help to improve your website SEO.
  • Understand your online customers. ...
  • Use keywords on your website. ...
  • Refresh your page content often. ...
  • Gain referrals from other websites. ...
  • Use meta tags in your content. ...
  • Stay up to date on the latest SEO techniques.
7 days ago

What is a Search Engine Optimization strategy? ›

An SEO strategy is the process of organizing a website's content by topic to improve the likelihood of appearing in search results. Essentially, it is the process you follow in order to maximize the opportunity to gain organic traffic from search engines.

What are the 5 advantages of using search engines? ›

Here are the advantages of using search engine you need to know:
  • Get The Consumer Trust. The first advantage of google search engine is get the consumer trust. ...
  • Trackable Results. ...
  • Generates Targeted Traffic. ...
  • Sustainable Clicks. ...
  • Grow Your Small Business. ...
  • Results Take Time. ...
  • Difficult Of Competitive Keywords. ...
  • Changing Algorithms.
Nov 8, 2021

Which of the following is a benefit of search engine marketing? ›

This is a well-practiced trend today as it is cheap, convenient and an efficient method of letting customers pick their interested goods and products out of the many varieties present in the market"

What is a search engine What are the benefits of search engine? ›

Internet search engines help to organize the Internet and individual websites. Search engines aid in organizing the vast amount of information that can sometimes be scattered in various places on the same web page into an organized list that can be used more easily.

Which of the following are the benefits of off page SEO optimization? ›

Benefits of Off-Page SEO
  • Increases Ranking: It helps your website rank higher on the SERPs hence resulting in earning good traffic.
  • Wonderful exposure: Higher the ranking, more will be the traffic because of the numbers of links, social media mentions and so on.
  • Increase in PageRank:
Nov 30, 2021

What are the 3 basic types of search engines? ›

There are three main types of search engines, web crawlers, directories, and sponsored links. Search engines typically use a number of methods to collect and retrieve their results. These include: Crawler databases.

What is search engine optimization? ›

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic. The aim is typically to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience.

What are the best feature of a search engine? ›

Check out these must-have search features that can help you identify the right platform:
  • Improved load speeds for search results and content pages. ...
  • Voice Search. ...
  • AI tools. ...
  • Delivery of personalized experiences. ...
  • Mobile-optimized search. ...
  • Adaptable search performance based on user Analytics. ...
  • 5 Best Practices for Site Search.
Dec 22, 2020

How do we use search engines effectively? ›

8 Tips to Help You Use Google, Other Search Engines More Efficiently
  1. Be specific with what you want. ...
  2. Use + and - ...
  3. Put key phrases in quotes. ...
  4. Use tabs to specify what you're looking for. ...
  5. Advanced search tips. ...
  6. Look for something on social media. ...
  7. Add website info into search. ...
  8. Definitions, equations, language translations.
Nov 1, 2021

Which is more important on page or off-page SEO? ›

On-page SEO is essential for a website, but off-page SEO is also important when it comes to ranking high on Google and getting your brand the right leads and exposure. With enough relevant backlinks, a site can rank much higher on search results than it can without them. But off-page SEO goes beyond backlinks.

What is the most important off-page SEO activity? ›

Creating backlinks is at the core of off-site SEO and is a technique that is crucial for any site with the aspiration of ranking on page one. Backlinks are the number one ranking factor when Google determines where your site ranks.

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