What is SEO and why you NEED TO KNOW

SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization, is an essential part of any brands and companies. Every business knows they need SEO to increase their presence online. But not many knows what extra value SEO brings.

No matter if you are a business, a brand or just YOURSELF, knowing the benefits of SEO can greatly increase your EAT – Experty, Authority and Trustworthiness.

Table of Contents

Organic Search is Where Most Company’s Traffic Comes From

Organic Search, meaning a customer typed in keywords that are related to you and clicked the link to visit your website. Organic search is the major source of traffic, also the BEGINNING of “Customer Journey”.

Stats shows over 80% of users found a new website through search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu. And Google contributes to almost 70% of all searches online.

This being said, knowing Google’s terms and policies, knowing how to optimize your presence, is important and will affect your rankings on Google, increase your impression and traffic, thus benefit your branding.

SEO Builds Trust

The goal of SEO is to build a reliable website with great UI/UX, which can help promote your value, products and services, making your presence online more visible and accessible.

Many factors could affect how “trustworthy” your website is, including:

High-quality back-links, meaning your contents are referenced by many other websites.
Good user engagement rate.
Optimized contents and elements on your website. (Yes, content is a key factor to almost any online presence.)

Building trust is crucial for your brand. However, you cannot have a “sudden increase in trustworthiness” in just a few days to weeks. It will take some time to build and accumulate your trust.

So, if you want to build a trustworthy brand, it’ll take a lot of patience, hard-work and commitments to build a solid foundation.

Meanwhile, you’d also need to prove valuable and high-quality products or services, let your customers enjoy your website, slowly and steadily increase your presence.

SEO Help Optimize User Experience

When talking about SEO, most people expect higher rankings and traffic. But few realized that a good user experience is essential to achieve your goal.

A website with great UI/UX gives your users better enjoyment and leaves a good impression, which will increase your conversion.

Because most users already know “what information they want to know”, so if your website could not answer their questions, or if it loads too slowly, they’ll just leave before even actually reading about your company.

Local SEO Increases the Engagement, Traffic and Conversion

With almost 70~90% of users visiting you using mobile devices, LOCAL SEO is now important to regional small-to-medium sized businesses.

LOCAL means to focus on a specific area, like county, cities, or even just a town. With local SEO, people could quickly find “nearby me” and increase sales.

For example, people may search for “restaurants near me” or “good beers in London”, businesses that are optimized for Local SEO will have a higher probability to show up on the first page.

If you are a local product or service provider, a freelancer or sales, local SEO will help you greatly with traffic, directly affecting customer engagement and conversion.

SEO Is Always Changing

Google changes its algorithm hundreds and thousands of times every year, usually a major update every 6 months to a year, and a core update every 2 years or less.

Which means, how to perform well in SEO and the best ways are always constantly changing as well.

If you only invest a short amount of time and resources into SEO, and not planning and analyzing the long-term situation, then the website will most likely drop its ranking due to new algorithms or problems.

If you happen to fall too much on the rankings, it will be very difficult to climb back up.

So, in order to keep ahead in the search engine world, all companies should consider a long-term SEO strategy, constantly review the website performance and any changes in Google, to plan ahead for possible change to always stay on top.

SEO Is Actually Cheaper Than Ads

When you start investing into SEO, it probably seems like a huge expense and time-consuming job. WELL, YOU’RE NOT WRONG.

But SEO actually yields much better results and revenue in the big picture: SEO IS A LONG-LASTING marketing strategy that WILL GENERATE TRAFFIC FOR MANY YEARS.

If we are talking about 3-5 or possibly more years of online presence, SEO is actually cheaper than buying ads and AdWords.

If you can utilize the “Fat Head, the Chunky Middle and the Long Tail Keywords” (which I’d like to explain later, it’s another topic) correctly, and your presence is always on Top 3 search results, the amount of impression and clicks accumulated over the years is actually much better than buying Keyword Ads.

Also, compared to Ads or Sponsored, people tend to trust organic ranking results more and see a better CTR as well. So if we are thinking of long-term operation, SEO is definitely a better choice.

SEO Is a Long-Term Strategy

SEO is not magic, you won’t see immediate results, (Unless you use black hat, which is another topic) but you are actually solving the core problems of your website to comply with search engine policies.

So it might take a few months of work until you can start seeing some results, like higher rankings, impressions, and clicks. Unless you know the tricks, it’s not likely to see some results in a few weeks (Well, I do know some, and I do have hundreds of top ranking articles.)

But the greatest thing about SEO is that it’s result is LONG-LASTING. Once your “Core Web Vitals” and “Speed, stability and usability” is established, that you can answer your audiences’ questions and gives them good experience, EVEN IF YOU DON’T ACTIVELY INVEST IN SEO LATER, YOUR WEBSITE’S POSITION AND AUTHORITY WILL LAST FOR YEARS.

Of course, it’s better to constantly monitor your SEO as the market and the algorithm is constantly changing, to keep up with the trends and direction of the global market change, will generate even better results.

SEO Results are Measurable

While SEO is not like AdWords where you can easily calculate your ROAS, but with tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can evaluate almost ALL OF YOUR SEO RESULTS: search clicks, website impressions, average positions and CTR to name a few.

With these metrics, looking at historical performance and current growth or decline, knowing when and where did your search results peak, you can thoroughly prepare for future social marketing strategies.

SEO Helps You to Know the Whole Market

The Internet is changing everyday, the platforms and the apps are always changing, and yes the algorithm too, which is core to almost every technology now.

Your competitors will only increase, new trends always happen, but what NEVER CHANGE IS THAT OUR RANKINGS IS ALWAYS CHANGING.

While no one can truly say they know every little change in the internet, with SEO, you are essentially learning the environment and predicting the trends, you are learning what makes the internet, and you will see that any major change affects the whole market, even the whole world. (Think COVID and how it boosted streaming-services and e-commerce)

SEO Is a Winner Take All Game

Search results are cruel. They hit you hard and real.

If you are not on the first page, you are losing the battle. If you are not on the second page, you are essentially lost.

Stats shows that the majority of users only clicks the top 10 results (first page), TOP 1 website gets 31% of the clicks. Second page results gets less than 1% of the clicks.

So if you aren’t in the top 10, when your potential customer Google your Keyword, they will most likely see your competitors. And remember, these people are using your keywords and searching for your services or products, so they are valuable and more likely to convert into your customers, so you’d naturally want to be the first thing they see on search right?

SEO is a Winner take all game, once you reach the first page, you will start seeing a steady and easy traffic to your website.

Conclusion

All businesses need SEO and try to reach page 1 if not top 3, it’s a long investment that will generate great results for years if done right.

SEO will bring organic traffic to you and assists you to plan future marketing strategy, it is actually cheaper than buying keywords and ads exposure.

With a few months of hard work, commitment and patience, you will see growth for the next few years.