Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an effective strategy to reach out to expand your company’s online growth and generate new customer traffic. Here are some opportunities SEO provides that you can take advantage of.

1. Organic Growth

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps companies organically grow their businesses online. The strategy has a solid structure that can be easily adapted to many different industries. With SEO, you’ll be able to utilize search engine results to expand your business and your brand while also learning more about what your customers want from your product or service. The increased engagement SEO provides will help you learn more about your customer base and come up with the best strategies to grow your base.

Lead Generation

The goal of SEO is to get a website to rank higher for a keyword. A keyword is a word or set of words a user searches for (on Google). Based on the search intent, keywords are grouped into four categories, namely, informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. 

A keyword is informational if the user is simply searching for information (example: what is an iPad Air). Navigational keywords include company or brand names (like Apple, Google, etc), commercial keywords are when a user is trying to learn more about a product or service (example, iPad Air review), and transactional keywords are the ones in which the searcher has purchase intent, like ‘buy iPad Air’. 

By producing content on the aforementioned keywords and linking them together, you can use SEO to build a marketing funnel that pumps out leads continuously. It might take some time for SEO to deliver results for your small business, but in comparison to advertisements, traffic from SEO is free, predictable and long-term.

2. Targeted Advertising

The keywords you incorporate into SEO content helps your products or services pop up for people searching for those kinds of products or services. For example, a court reporters Portland service would show up in someone’s search for a court reporter in the city of Portland if the service linked the appropriate keywords to rank highly in the search results. Targeted advertising is a way to help bring customers to you organically when they might otherwise miss your advertising or outreach.

3. Engagement

One of the most useful opportunities SEO provides is the ability to maximize customer engagement, particularly through creating engaging content. You can leverage SEO to ensure your content shows up when someone searches something related to your business. Make sure your content utilizes important keywords and provides information or generates audience interest. To generate traffic to your site, make sure you’re posting quality content on a regular basis. The best strategy is to release varied content, including videos, blog posts and informative articles to reach more people and keep the content feeling new. For example, a cafe could release blog series with videos from poetry or music events, articles about types of coffee and baking tips. These creative, entertaining pieces of content will generate interest from potential customers and shore up engagement with existing customers.

4. Exposure

SEO is all about exposure. The way to gain exposure through SEO is rather simple once you get used to it. You need to find ways to incorporate keywords related to your industry and company operations. These keywords help your website get ranked highly on lists of search engine results, so people using the search engine are more likely to see your site. The more people click, the higher your SEO ranking will be, and that exposure will continue to grow and make your brand more recognizable even to people who haven’t searched related keywords.

5. Retainment

SEO aids in retaining customers as well. A steady stream of new engaging content helps draw customers back to check your site more often, especially if they find the information interesting, entertaining and useful. Because search engines rank content based on speed as well as relevant content, another aspect of SEO is optimizing your website’s user experience. The content and the ease with which customers can access it on your site will help you build a relationship with your customers and retain them.

6. Marketing Strategy

Above all, SEO is a digital marketing strategy. There are many ways to apply it, from basic keyword optimization to social media engagement. You can use SEO in tandem with other digital marketing strategies and tools to increase your marketing power, such as email marketing and data analytics. SEO benefits customers by providing them with content that is relevant to their searches and it benefits the businesses employing it as a marketing strategy too.

There are many benefits of SEO and opportunities to leverage it for your business. One of the best benefits of SEO is its versatility. No matter the industry, SEO is likely to be able to help generate interest and traffic to your business’ website and expand your brand recognition.