Investing in activities to improve search engine optimisation can seem superfluous, especially if you’re fortunate enough to enjoy a steady stream of sales. Or, if you’re a B2B organisation in a niche marketplace.
Perhaps you have a clear strategy to generate leads with PPC and other paid-for activities, so organic SEO feels like an afterthought.
This could be a good time to assess SEO’s value to your business. You need to decide, do I really need to source SEO consultant services?
This article explains the things to consider, to decide if investment in search engine optimisation will improve your sales.
Competitor analysis
This is the big one.
Are your competitors actively working to improve their rankings in search results? You will know, by how consistently their pages appear at the top of search listings. The time to be concerned is if you’re sinking down the results in an alarming way.
Let’s give that some context.
There are 3.5 billion each day – 40,000 per second!
Internet users then click on a result within less than a minute. Three-quarters of those clicks are on the top five search results. The lower down the rankings you are, the less likely it is people will find you!
To be clear, SEO matters to you if your competitors are the ones getting the bulk of leads generated by organic searches.
Do people really search for my product/service?
This is another easy question to answer with some simple desktop research.
Google provides various tools to help you explore search activity relevant to your company – including Google Trends.
There’s a high chance the answer is yes, people do search for your products or services, increasingly using mobile devices. In which case you need to make sure they find you. Simple.
Customer research
In the age of digital marketing, it’s easy to overlook one of the most important business improvement tools. Customer feedback!
If you’re weighing up whether SEO matters, ask people you already do business with. How did they find you in the first place? Would they tend to search online for products and services like yours?
If you can, ask them to indicate the sort of terms they would use in searches too, which can better inform the keywords you use in your SEO.
Reputation matters
The value of appearing high in search results is not just about clicks and authentic business leads.
The fact is consumers often do online research before making buying decisions. Plus, potential B2B customers will check your ‘digital footprint’ as a measure of whether you are an authoritative, brand-focused and respected industry player.
If your company gets a low ranking in search results, the implication may be that you don’t tick the right boxes in terms of reputation.
So, SEO helps build brand awareness and digital outreach.
Do you need more leads or more lead conversion?
This is another fundamental consideration in working out whether an investment in SEO is a good idea.
What is your current business priority and what are your immediate goals?
If your website is already generating large amounts of traffic, but you’re not getting enough sales, you have a lead conversion problem. You can solve that in various ways, such as measuring if you’ve attracted the RIGHT traffic and making sure your website User Experience (UX) is strong enough.
However, if the level of traffic your pages attract is not good enough, you need to look for an SEO consultant UK businesses use to build their search rankings.
Also, if you’re using PPC and other paid-for activities, but sales are poor, you may have a flawed online ad strategy. Keep in mind that an effective freelance SEO consultant can provide you with a steady flow of organic leads. As well as providing you with data to make your paid-for activities far more effective.
Making it a doubly good reason to invest in SEO!
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