Wondering why your business SEO for business growth? In this post, I’ll explain why.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important tool for any business looking to increase its visibility online and grow its customer base. SEO can help your business stand out from the competition, reach more customers, and ultimately drive sales.
I rely on SEO heavily for this business and my travel blogs that I run in order to continually get traffic. In fact, SEO is one of the top 2 ways that I grow my email list for this website design business of mine – so trust me when I say that it works.
In short, SEO is an invaluable tool for businesses that are serious about growth. Whether you’re just getting started or already have a mature website, investing in SEO is likely one of the best investments you could make for long-term success.
Keep reading (or listen below) to learn more about why your business needs SEO and how it can transform your business!
Why Your Business Needs SEO
It increases your visibility.
Now, there are about a million reasons that SEO is super important, but here are just some of the biggest ones.
The first one is that it will give you increased visibility. So SEO can help improve your website’s rankings in search engine results, and higher rankings are going to lead to increased visibility, which is going to make it a lot more likely for users to discover and visit your website.
You’ll also be able to get targeted traffic. SEO is going to ensure that your website appears in front of the users who are already searching for the products, services, or info related to your business, and I guarantee you, no matter how niche you are, there are people searching for what you offer.
The targeted traffic, because it’s targeted, is more likely to convert into customers, subscribers, or leads over time.
One thing to keep in mind is that people who find you through SEO, a lot of the time, are going to be cold leads. That’s why we recommend you get their email address by adding a freebie throughout your site or blog content to keep them around.
If you implement blogging, which is something we definitely recommend, then it is possible to find what we call “buyer intent keywords,” and those are ones like “Thrivecart versus Samcart.”
If someone’s searching for that, then they’re already pretty much ready to buy, and if you use keywords like that when you’re writing blogs, then you’re a lot more likely to get, for instance, like an affiliate link click.
SEO is cost-effective for marketing.
SEO is a lot more cost-effective compared to traditional advertising methods because it’s a lot cheaper. You pretty much just need to pay for a keyword research tool; we always recommend Keysearch, which is $17 a month, and once your website ranks well, it’s pretty easy to maintain that ranking if you just keep your content updated.
You can easily build trust and credibility.
You will also be able to build trust and credibility when you have SEO. So websites that appear on the first page of search results for keywords are often perceived as a lot more trustworthy and credible.
Think about it. If you want to get a new pair of sneakers, you go online and search for “best purple sneakers for running outside.”
You’re probably a lot more likely to trust whoever is on the very top of that page on Google compared to who’s on the top of the second page, such as something to keep in mind, believe it or not.
Get improved user experience.
You can also have an improved user experience with SEO because it involves optimizing your website structure and content, which can lead to a much better user experience, and a user-friendly site is more likely to retain visitors and encourage them to return.
You can beat the competition.
Plus, you’ll be able to beat the competition because, in highly competitive industries, SEO can give your online business an edge over competitors by helping your website rank higher in search results, especially if your competition has not yet gotten into the world of SEO or even focused on it.
Get insights into your consumer behavior.
Plus, you’ll be able to get more of an insight into consumer behavior. So, really just paying attention to people who are visiting your site, SEO tools, and analytics will provide a lot more valuable data on user behavior and search patterns.
You can also see where people are landing on your site, and everything like that, and this info can be used to fix your marketing strategies over time or even create new products and services to meet the demand of the people who are visiting your site most.
So, for instance, on Volumes and Voyages, our travel blog, our most popular post is on the best waffles in Brussels. So if you go on Google right now and you search best waffles in Brussels, our post comes up first, and I think we only have two posts on Belgium on our entire site.
That’s telling us right there that we should be writing a lot more about Belgium because at the moment, Google is seeing us as someone who knows a lot about Belgium, and the people visiting our site probably want to learn more about Belgium!
SEO has long-lasting benefits.
SEO also gives you a long-term strategy, so when it’s done effectively, it’s going to have lasting benefits. But again, it can take 6 to 18 months for you even to start to reap the rewards.
One thing to keep in mind, too, is that, unlike paid advertising, which stops when you stop paying, organic search traffic can continue to bring visitors to your website over time.
And also, it’s going to help you build brand awareness because higher search engine rankings are going to increase your brand exposure, even if users don’t click on your website immediately. Seeing your brand name consistently at the top of the search results can really help to build that brand awareness.
What Happens When You Ignore SEO
You can have low visibility.
Without proper SEO, your website may not rank well in search engine results, which can lead to low online visibility, and, as a result, potential customers that could have bought from you may not even be able to find your website.
Organic search traffic is a valuable source of visitors who are actively looking for products or services that you offer, which I know I mentioned already. Ignoring SEO means that you’re going to miss out on the opportunity to attract those people.
Plus, your competitors who invest in SEO or even take the time to implement SEO on their own are going to likely outrank and outperform you in the search results, which could also lead to again, losing potential customers and, at the end of the day, if they had been able to see your website and their website, it’s possible that they would have chosen you anyway if you were a better fit.
You could reduce your credibility.
You can also potentially reduce your credibility, so websites that appear on the first page of search results are often seen as more credible and trustworthy.
Ignoring SEO can result in lower rankings, which can negatively impact the perceived trustworthiness of your business.
You could give your users a poor experience on-site.
You might also potentially give yourself a poor user experience on your site because, again, SEO involves optimizing your website structure and neglecting this can technically potentially lead to a poorly designed website, which again could drive users away from your content.
You will most out on a lot of data that could help you.
Lastly, you will be missing out on a lot of data that could help you. So SEO tools and analytics are going to provide a lot of insights into user behavior, especially for your site, and by ignoring SEO, you’re going to miss out on the opportunity to leverage that data, learn from that data, and make better decisions.
Challenges of Implementing SEO
Balancing creativity with SEO
One of the biggest challenges we always hear about is how to balance artistic vision and SEO best practices on your website!
That’s why we very much try to focus on both because we’re firm believers that you can have both. You can have a website that looks super good and is personality-packed but still has search engine optimization on it.
Figuring out who to actually listen to
Another challenge can also be trying to figure out who to listen to, because there’s so much education about SEO out there.
Obviously, you can 100% go on Google, find any information you want about SEO implemented on your own, and also apply it, but there’s a lot of noise out there. It gets hard to know who to trust because, with SEO specifically, there are so many people saying different things.
Overall, you’ll find there’s probably at least some line that brings everything together, but every single person who does SEO has something different that they focus on and that they find works best, so it can be really hard to find that person that you want to trust and that you want to listen to and when it comes to learning and applying these techniques.
These challenges are why we created Inkpot Creative Club. We really wanted to have a space where you could learn from somebody at not the SEO course price because a lot of SEO courses out there are over $1,000.
And when I personally first started learning SEO, I really struggled to find something that I could invest in, that could at least kind of give me an in so that I could at least start to learn it. There were just a lot of courses out there that cost a lot more than I could afford when I first started.
I think if I had been able to afford those or if there was a lower-cost option when I started, then I probably would have started reaping the rewards a lot sooner.
Deciding how to stand out in a competitive industry
Another challenge that we hear about a lot is standing out and actually being visible in a competitive industry.
We tend to personally work with a lot of designers and a lot of photographers, and here’s the thing… we get it. There are so many designers and photographers out there, but you have some type of thing that makes you stand out, and, no matter your niche, people are searching for it, in fact, the more niche you are, the higher your chances of ranking even sooner.
So, for instance, it’s going to be easier to rank for something like “Las Vegas LGBT wedding photographer” than “Vegas wedding photographer.”
How to Track Your Results with SEO
What to track with SEO
Measure the number of page views that your website has from organic search results. Those are the ones you really want to pay attention to as you implement SEO because it is going to indicate the effectiveness of your current strategy.
You also want to be tracking keyword rankings, so keeping track of the rankings of your target keywords in search engine results and improvement in your keyword rankings over time are again going to demonstrate the impact of your SEO efforts.
Some keywords, depending on their difficulty, maybe a lot harder to rank for over time, which is just something to keep in mind.
In a tool like Google Search Console, you can also check your average overall ranking, which is one thing that a lot of people overlook. But you want an overall high ranking for your entire website because that’s just really saying that Google is trusting you, and that’s different than your independent keyword rankings.
You’ll also want to check out your bounce rate, so you can monitor the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate is going to indicate that users either decided you weren’t a good fit, maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for, or they didn’t find your content engaging.
You can also measure time on a page, which is just the average time that someone spends on one of your web pages. The longer average time on page suggests that visitors are finding valuable content and that they’re engaging with it.
However, depending on your niche, time on page might not matter a whole lot, especially if your blog post is very to the point.
For instance, on our travel blog, sometimes our time on page is less than a minute, but we have very quick links at the top of all of our posts that let people click exactly where they want to go. It’ll bring them down to that section. They can just read the one little paragraph that they need and leave.
Lastly, you’ll also want to pay attention to your page load speed, because you want your web pages to load fast. If they load slowly, google can actually rank you lower, which is something to keep in mind, which is why we always say that you need to be watching your images when you upload them to your website.
What tools to use to track your SEO
You’ll also want to pay attention to the tools and resources that you can use in order to measure and track your progress to specifically the ones we were talking about.
So again, that’s going to be Google Search Console for tracking your keywords and what you’re ranking for.
You can also use Google Analytics to see your overall analytics, like page views and the landing pages that people are specifically landing on when they visit your site.
Our favorite tool personally for tracking progress is Key Search. There is actually a rank tracker directly in there that you can use if you don’t want to do it manually.
Adjusting Your SEO Strategy Over Time
Over time you’re also going to want to adjust strategies based on the insights that you get from SEO. Of course, you’ll want to start by first implementing SEO onto your website and then conducting keyword research and optimizing your website content. You can also add more pages by blogging.
Then you’re going to want to build high-quality backlinks to improve your overall visibility and start to leverage social media and other digital marketing channels by just kind of reusing the content you’ve already created. And we highly recommend adjusting your strategies based specifically on what is ranking best for you.
When it comes to SEO, you actually really want to create what we “content buckets.”
So, for instance, in our business, we have a few different content buckets. We have our web design bucket. So we’re going to make a whole bunch of content about website design. We have our Notion bucket, so we’ll be making a whole bunch of content about Notion, and we might potentially also be having a podcast bucket or something like that. And then we also have like our blogging bucket.
Essentially you want to write about each of those different topics in your blogs until you can’t write about them anymore, and that’s just going to signal to Google that you know exactly what you’re talking about, and over time you might find that the more you write about them, the higher you’re going to get ranked.
And also, if you find early on, as you’re just starting to fill out the content buckets that let’s say you have like 20 posts on website design but like 30 on Notion, and your website design posts are ranking a lot higher, than that means Google is very much seeing you as a website design expert, and again you can kind of adjust your strategy from there to be like “OK, then I need to be writing a lot more about website design.”
Final Thoughts: SEO for Business Growth
So again, you definitely want to be using SEO for your creative business. We have even seen the rewards directly in our business.
We have one post that we made that was basically built around a podcast episode that we had a while back on website launch announcement ideas, and it is our most visited blog post every month.
It gets around 500 clicks, and it really works as a way for us to grow our email list because we have a freebie directly in it, and we end up getting 20 new people on our email list every month just from that post. So it’s us that’s saying that we should, again, be talking a lot more about website design!
I did want to say, too, that you can 100% do this. We highly recommend you start implementing SEO sooner rather than later.
If you really want to piece things together, you can. But you got this; you can do this, and you should be implementing SEO strategies. And if you do want some mentorship and some guidance as you do that, then 100% check out the Inkpot Creative Club.
Check these out next:
- How to Stand Out Online with Steph Hennessy
- 7 Benefits of SEO for Small Business
- Is Showit good for SEO?
- Is Yoast SEO Good? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Yoast Green Light
KP’s design journey began in book publishing, but she fell in love with the truly limitless possibilities that web design presents. Since then, she’s been helping photographers and creatives become the no-brainer option for their dream clients before they even get on a call.
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8/14/23
Published On:
Krystianna Pietrzak
