How Companies Are Using SEO To Grow Business

Businesses that want to make it big online should win the search engine optimization (SEO) game. But the competition is stiff, with nearly all websites working toward high search engine rankings. That’s why many don’t leave it to chance and work with an SEO agency with a sound strategy.

Yet how do companies use SEO to grow? Here are four ways:

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1. Companies Use SEO To Reach a Massive Audience

Despite social media’s popularity, organic search still delivers the highest traffic. Google alone receives over four billion users globally. Websites on search engine results pages (SERPs) are also more likely to have incredible clickthrough rates (CTRs).

In other words, being in the search results guarantees maximum exposure to the target audience.

But how does one become part of the SERPs? That’s what SEO is for.

When someone enters a query into a search engine, it scours billions of documents and does two things:

• It returns only those results relevant or useful to the searcher’s query.
• It ranks those results according to popularity.

SEO can influence both. It can enhance relevancy by improving the site’s content quality. This way, search engine crawlers can index the pages faster. It also adds relevant keywords to ensure your website appears in the top results when someone types in a query.

Meanwhile, SEO promotes popularity through link building or link earning. The more links you have from high-quality websites, the higher your site will rank on the SERPs.

When done right, SEO becomes a reliable lead-generation tool. Look at our case study for Cove Markets. Modifying the content strategy increased the site traffic 14 times in six months. It also helped the client rank over 40 keywords in the top three positions within the same period.

2. Businesses Apply SEO to Enhance User Experience

Have you checked out Amazon lately? If you haven’t been paying attention, its design has significantly changed over the years. Gone are clunky menus, replaced by a straightforward search bar.

And you will see similar transformations on other websites. The reason is simple: user experience (UX) can make or break you.

Most internet users don’t want to deal with slow page speeds, error pages, and broken links. Certainly, they won’t interact with websites with thin content and insecure connections.

SEO won’t be your be-all and end-all solution for a better user experience. But it can enhance UX:

• It can reduce page speed. The average user expects a website to load in less than three seconds. If it takes longer, they will hit the back button and find another. SEO reworks that by compressing images, minifying code, and caching pages.
• SEO can improve the site structure. Creating a logical hierarchy of your pages and adding internal links make it easy for users to find their way around your website. These also help search engines understand your site and index it accordingly.
• SEO encourages you to follow the EAT principle. Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines tell SEO specialists to focus on three things in their content: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

3. Firms Increase Online Credibility With SEO

In the age of fake news and security breaches, credibility is a major online currency. No one knows it by heart than search engines. It is a possible ranking factor. Google also rewards reliable websites with higher placement on the SERPs.

You cannot build trustworthiness overnight. But you can use SEO to shore up your credibility fast. For instance, it can raise your website’s domain authority (DA), a metric that judges the strength of a website’s backlink profile.

A site’s DA score can predict its ability to rank on the SERPs. Usually, a bigger number correlates to a higher position in the search results.

To know your DA, look into several factors, including the number and quality of inbound links, the age of the domain, and the number of indexed pages. All these should indicate that your website is well-established and legitimate.

The right SEO can also increase brand mentions that others, including your competitors, talk about you. It solidifies that you are a niche expert, the ultimate go-to source of information in your field.

4. Businesses Maximize SEO for Local Search

You can have a high CTR and traffic and still not get the leads and sales you want. It usually happens when you have the wrong audience.

Either way, it spells disaster, especially for small businesses. You’re draining your marketing budget to attract people who will never be your customers.

You can take many approaches to deal with the problem; one of the most effective is local SEO.

To understand how it works, let’s have an example. Let’s say you’re a pizzeria in Los Angeles. Local SEO will have you rank for keywords like “Los Angeles pizzeria near me,” not “pizzerias in California” or “best pizzas in the United States.”

At first glance, this strategy sounds limiting, but it contributes to business growth in three ways:

1. Local SEO puts you in front of the right audience. When you target locally, you eliminate low-intent keywords that people use. You also avoid competing with huge brands for generic keywords.
2. It improves SERP rankings. Almost half of all Google searches are local. When people search "pizza near me," they want the restaurant's name, address, and phone number. Google considers your NAP (name, address, phone number), customer reviews, and citations. You'll get more website visitors if these factors are in order.
3. Local SEO matches the ever-changing consumer behavior. According to HubSpot, over 70% of consumers who searched for local information visited a business within five miles.

Final Words

SEO is a solid and stable marketing strategy that can help businesses of all sizes. You can use it to boost your brand and grow your business, but only if you know how to use it.

Avoid wasting money and get results fast by outsourcing to an SEO agency. The right team knows your niche and understands its needs. You are in a better position to reach your marketing goals.