Why Every Business Needs SEO in 2022(Even yours)

Look.

It pains me to say this…

But if you run a business in 2022, with 91% of the internet(that’s 4 billion people) using Google at least once a week. Then I don’t know how else to say it, but you are literally taking your money and throwing it away. 

(All the money you’re losing from missed customers)

With COVID forcing everyone to stay indoors for the last 2 and a half years, people have become comfortable with doing the majority of their shopping over the internet. 63% of shopping occasions begin online (Thinkwithgoogle). 

This means that no matter where customers are finally making the purchase (online or in a brick-and-mortar store), their customer journey is starting online – in most cases, on Google.

With the ease and flexibility of simply “Googling” something, the majority of consumers research what they want before they go ahead and buy it.

This research phase is the ultimate deciding factor on whether or not your business takes on a new customer. 

While your potential customers are researching your services(and your competitors), they make the final decision on who they will be giving their business to. 

Obviously, you want that decision to align with your business(and so do I; I’m cheering for you).

This is why brands must have a strong online presence. By improving the customer experience from the very first step, businesses have a higher chance of getting customers to buy from them. While there are many different ways that you can find customers, none carry the same number of positives that SEO brings to the table, and there are also fewer negatives.

You see…

Search Engine Optimization is the Most Effective Way to Find Customers

Google is tracking its user’s data and search habits 24/7.

And while that is a bit creepy, Google has reported some very important statistics.

Their studies revealed that every month, people visit 1.5 billion destinations because of an online search. Furthermore, 78% of people who search for something nearby visit that location within one day. To top it all off, more than a quarter of those users turn into paying customers. 

Additionally 

85% of Americans use the internet regularly. It should go without saying, but any business worth its salt goes where its customers are and 91% of consumers use the Internet to look for local goods or services.

Lastly, 66% of all consumers do online research before they buy something, including physical items at a store.

(Eager prospect after finding your business off a Google Search)

How Can SEO Help Your Business in 2022?

SEO can help your business by positioning it right in front of your most qualified prospects. This is because people use Google to find solutions to their problems, just like people used to use the Yellow Pages decades ago. If you want to grab these itchy-to-buy prospects, then you need to optimize your website to show up on their search results, and that’s what SEO is all about. 

Let me show you the importance of this by giving you a typical Google user’s buying journey. Let’s call him Joe.

What Your Customers Are Doing On the Internet

Joe, like most people, refuses to waste his money on an inferior service or product…

That’s why, before he decides to take his money out of his wallet, Joe does in-depth research on what’s available to find out the best purchase for him. This time, it just so happens to be hurricane season and Joe’s roof isn’t doing too well. In fact, it needs help right now!

So, just like anyone who’s looking for a solution to a problem, Joe goes onto the internet and types into Google what he’s looking for.

“Best roofer near me”

 After ending with these search results, Joe does what the majority of Google users do and looks at the couple of websites shown at the top of Google.

So this means that if you’re a roofer and you’re not on thereafter Joe searches on Google, you won’t be making a new customer. That’s the sad reality of Google… If you are not on the first page, you pretty much don’t exist. I looked at the other pages just for science, and I saw that more than a hundred roofers were lost in the backroads of Google. 

After Joe sees these pages, he starts looking at their reviews and the website itself and reading the copy to figure out who he’s going to hire. After a couple of minutes of research, Joe calls up the best roofer for him.

That roofer is likely to make a new sale right then and there, and unlike the guys paying for PPC, the roofers at the top of Google aren’t paying a single cent to acquire new customers.

Since you don’t have to pay for SEO after it’s done on your website,

SEO has a larger ROI than most forms of Marketing

The primary advantage of SEO is that after you’ve worked on your website, your SEO efforts will continue to pay off by giving you a slice of the free traffic that’s on Google. 

In Search Engine Journal’s poll of expert marketers, 49% said that SEO brought the highest ROI to their website.

This is because, unlike PPC, where Google stops feeding you traffic as soon as you stop paying them, SEO is an investment that keeps on paying dividends.

However, this is not to say that SEO and PPC cannot coexist. In fact:

SEO works effectively with other advertisement channels

Typically, SEO and PPC are seen as sisters who hate each other. I mean, they are both competing for the same spot on Google, right? 

However, thinking that you can only use one or the other will lead you to miss out on the enormous benefits of applying both to your online marketing. This is because insights gained from SEO help PPC tremendously and vice versa.

Given how important keyword research is, SEO helps you get a better read on keyword intent, which helps you avoid paid keyword traps in PPC.

For example, say I google “online courses,”

Two out of three of the PPC ads are for companies that take classes for their customers, while one is for enrolling in an online university.

However, when you look at the organic SEO results, you’ll realize that these companies are burning their money on these Ads because the search intent is completely different.

As you can see here, Google only returns websites that sell online courses. This isn’t a coincidence.

This is because the people who go on Google and type “online courses” in the search bar are looking for websites that give them online courses.

Not online universities…

And not a service that takes courses for you.

Had these websites that are doing PPC also done SEO, they would have known that the search intent doesn’t match up with their service.

Instead, they are bleeding money on an ineffective PPC campaign.

Also, given the importance of website quality in rankings, 

SEO tactics Passively improve user experience.

Website page speed is one of Google’s many ranking factors. This means that any good SEO strategy will optimize a website to be as fast as it needs to be.

This is important because website speed does more than just put you higher up on Google; it also dramatically affects your sales.

Bounce rates increase by 9% if your website takes 2 seconds to load and 38% of your site takes 5 seconds to load. These are all potential customers slipping past your fingertips.

Decreased bounce rates and higher conversions from a better user experience also enable you to be more aggressive with your other advertisement campaigns.

You see, when your website becomes authoritative and has the content your market loves to consume, something magical happens.

Suddenly, your cost per acquisition for each new customer goes down. This means that you can spend the same amount of money on Ads and get even more customers…

Or, if you’re more ambitious, you can rapidly scale your digital reach because you can offset the cost with conversions, something your competitors might not be able to do. 

On top of that (yes, there’s even more), given how you can target qualified leads in your market with SEO, that also opens up the doors for retargeting ads.

Say someone lands on your service page or blog post related to a service you offer…

Sometimes, it might simply not be the right moment for them to buy from you, and they don’t convert.

However, with retargeting ads, you can still keep in touch with that prospect as you can specifically send your messaging to them.

Later, when they are surfing the web, the Ad you made specifically for them will show up and they will reengage with your business.

This dramatically increases your chances of making a sale because not only are they highly qualified, but these prospects already know you because they discovered you organically.

With all these benefits, it’s clear that a successful  SEO campaign will shower your business with clients in more ways than you might easily notice. 

SEO adds a permanent, compounding value to your website, and not implementing it in 2022 is a sabotage of your business.

It hurts to say this, but SEO might not always be the right move.

You see…

SEO is Getting More and More Competitive by the Year

The importance and value of SEO have only gone up over the years and will continue to do so in the future. 

As of now, Google’s users search 2 trillion times a year. With more and more people utilizing technology for their everyday tasks, having a dominant presence on the internet is becoming mandatory. 

More and more businesses are picking up on the value of SEO. 10 years ago you could rank just by putting keywords in your pages, however, these days, almost half of all businesses are investing in SEO.

Additionally, it is critical to understand that SEO is like a marathon race.

Every little step you take makes a small percentage of difference in advantage to the rest of the field. These small steps add up(and quickly), meaning you could have a staggering

lead in a couple of months. 

(You are slowly building a lead over your competitors)

With that said, if you were to start the race months or years behind your competition, imagine the sort of advantage they’d have over you. 

This is one of the mistakes I see many business owners make–thinking they can just jump into SEO and start winning even when their competition has been in the race for years. Or, even worse, thinking they can just sit back and wait while their competition steadily builds a larger gap.

If you’re thinking about doing SEO and it is a good fit for your business, the best time to start working on SEO was yesterday. However, since we don’t have time machines, the second-best time is right now. The sooner your website gets optimized and starts climbing organic search, the sooner you can start receiving more itchy-to-buy customers than you can handle.

This could mean starting to learn SEO and doing it all yourself, which is great if you have some spare time to learn, make mistakes, rinse and repeat until you rank. However, if your time or energy is tied to running actual business tasks, consider hiring a professional SEO agency with a guarantee that makes our competitors cower in fear (yes, we’re that confident).

Conclusion

If you had an investment opportunity that was guaranteed to give you massive returns in a year and even further down the line….

Would you take it?

This is what separates successful businesses from the mediocre. 

Successful businesses do what’s necessary to reach more customers and scale, while the businesses that fail are left to starve.

This means investing resources into developing a system that reliably brings more customers through their doors. This is exactly what SEO is for.
If you would like to learn how to get started with SEO, check out this guide on the blog. You can learn SEO and get started on improving your rankings immediately.