I’m sure many of you, whether you’re a financial advisor or practicing lawyer, are asked by potential clients why they should care about your service. To you, it’s a no-brainer, but to them, it’s an extremely valid question. When potential clients ask me why they should care about SEO, I immediately ask them whether or not they are an e-commerce brand. Most small business owners don’t have e-commerce platforms and instead use their websites as an extension of their marketing efforts. Most of my energy is spent asking potential clients how their customers find out about them online.
It’s a pretty straightforward process after asking these two initial questions. First, I bring up the Google AdWords Keyword and Traffic Estimator tools and run some of their major keywords. They are usually surprised by how many people are searching for keywords that relate to their product or service. Then, I run a rank tracker on some of the highest traffic keywords and find out where their website ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs.)
These examples focus on the value of keywords and why they’re important to the potential client. Although, there are 4 main reasons to why SEO should be important to anyone trying to sell or market a product/service on the Internet.
1. People start the buying process with search. About 75% of all Internet users looking for a product or service start their quest with a search engine, like Google. A professional search marketing and SEO strategy could derive anywhere from 50-80% of its web traffic from organic search.
2. Search marketing is pull marketing. It’s 2012. Search and social media marketing bring us back to 1920 when small town rules sold products and services. Back then, people didn’t push their products onto customers; instead, they pulled their customers in the door by focusing their attention on relationship building and being active in their communities. Search isn’t a TV commercial or a phone solicitation or a magazine ad. Search doesn’t go to the customers, the customers go to you. Search marketing cultivates far more qualified traffic compared to most advertising mediums.
3. Organic search is a value. Unlike PPC, display, and affiliate marketing efforts, SEO is a long-term value because it continues far beyond when the SEO campaign ends. According to a SEOmoz study, the traffic earned in organic for the medical information industry would have costed 14 times more if it were purchased through PPC ads.
4. Your competitors are invested in SEO. It’s easy to find competitors ranking for nearly any site for various long-tailed keywords, and in some cases, terms near the head of the curve.
Remember, in-house SEO efforts are a bad idea, usually because a developer, designer, or copywriter is handed the job without any experience. Sure, they may change meta tags or on-page content, but will they get you the links you need to fuel your site’s rankings?