The importance of SEO nowadays is the key to having a successful website, especially when it comes to digital marketing, it’s more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. If you have a website, forum, blog or an online store, SEO can help you increase your clicks and free traffic from search engines.
Key factors:
- Mostly when users try to find something, they usually click on one of the first five websites on the search engine results page (SERP). The statistics show that more than 65% of the users do this daily.
- Good SEO practice improves the UX (user experience) and also the usability of the website.
- Users tend to trust search engines, so logically if your website is in the top SERP’s, then your website will appeal more secure and safe to users.
- SEO is very good for the social promotion of your website. Users who find your website on Google or Yahoo or Bing! tend to promote it/share it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media, even maybe locally to their friends and family.
- SEO helps with websites that are bigger. Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is an increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
- SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same product, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
Growth
In the end, the ultimate reason SEO is essential is that it can help you achieve many of your business goals. SEO can help you build better relationships with your audience, improve the customer experience, increase your authority, drive more people to your site, give you an edge over the competition, and increase conversions, which means more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your business.
Search Engines Can Fail
A final note that’s worth mentioning is that SEO is important because search engines aren’t perfect, and if you don’t take steps to counter their failings, then your website will pay the price. For example, if a site doesn’t have a proper link structure, then search engines may not crawl and index the site properly, and this can lower rankings. Moreover, coding errors can block search engines entirely, making it impossible for your site to rank, no matter how much time you put into other SEO efforts.
Other common areas where search engines can run into problems include:
- Duplicate pages
- Forms
- Images, videos, audio files, flash and etc.
- Language and semantics
