If you’ve spent any time in the online corporate world, “SEO” is a term that often comes up in conversation. Webmasters, marketing teams and hosting providers routinely stress the importance of incorporating a good SEO plan into your website, but few novice website owners actually understand that importance – or even what it all means. So what is SEO and why is it so important for your website?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that involve strategically placed words and key phrases that most succinctly describe your website, within your website. Search engines use programs called crawlers that creep your site and index all the pages and information, based on those keywords and their relevancy. When people perform searches based on those keywords and phrases, the sites that have the highest index rating (best SEO strategy) are returned within the first few crucial results. Internet users want information fast, without having to click an endless array of links to get it. So having your site ranked on the first page of search results is imperative for good traffic…

The search engines use special algorithms to index the pages accordingly. From time to time these algorithms are changed by the search engines, which means your SEO tactics must change as well, to keep up with the competition. You need to have an experienced SEO person in charge of your website’s SEO campaign to keep up with those changes. Simply building a website and hoping for traffic is not enough and will never be effective in drawing traffic. Including a comprehensive SEO campaign in your business’ marketing budget is not only a good investment, it’s a critical one.

The benefits of SEO for your website are numerous. A few of the more attractive ones include:

1. High ROI (Return on Investment) – A solid SEO campaign can bring the highest return on your initial investment than any other online marketing tactic.
2. Residual Benefits – Unlike paid advertising where your “face time” runs out when your money does, search engine placement lasts in the long term, thereby stretching your marketing dollar even further –  and it doesn’t cost you any more than the initial investment.
3. Increased Visibility and Brand Awareness – The higher your site ranks in the search engines, the more people will visit it. Higher placements ensures high exposure for your site, due to the arrival of new and diverse traffic.
4. Increased Sales – Obviously, with more traffic coming in, the greater the chance you have of converting those visitors to paying customers.

What makes a comprehensive SEO campaign the most cost effective method of online marketing is that you’re paying your SEO expert to tailor a plan that’s, essentially, going to run and finance itself. Unlike Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which combines SEO with Pay Per Click (PPC) programs that have to be paid out on a regular and continuous basis in order to work, an effective SEO campaign continues to do what your paid your SEO team for it to do long after your initial investment was made. There are no surprises, no hidden costs or fees. Once in place, the SEO campaign only has to be tweaked when the search engine algorithms are. What’s more, some type of monitoring service is included in most SEO campaigns that will gauge your website’s placement over time and tweak it accordingly, which ensures you get the most for every marketing dollar you spend.

If you’ve noticed a sudden drop in traffic to your site or are simply wondering how to get more, an effective SEO campaign is the first (and perhaps, the most important) you should take on your marketing journey. Let the experts at SearchRight show you what one of our customized SEO packages can do for your website.