Why Should You SEO?

As SEO enters the mainstream of business marketing strategies you would think that less time would have to be spent educating people on why SEO is so very important. But the fact of the matter is, many people still just don't understand SEO or the benefits it can bring. Worse, many companies haven't yet grasped the fact that SEO is crucial to long-term online success, especially for small companies without big brand names or budget.

Jake Matthews put together a great post at 10e20 obtaining why search engine optimization is crucial for small businesses. He discusses a handful of benefits that a good SEO can bring to any online business, small or large.

* Obtain Increased and Higher Quality Sales
Just as you begin to optimize your website, long tail search volumes will improve. Over the long term, with a lot of hard work, you can achieve significant positions on the major search engines leading to positive, bottom line results.
* Increased Search Engine Visibility
When a searcher finds you, they have INTENT. They pulled themselves right to you for a reason; they are looking for what you have.
* Brand Recognition
Strong niche oriented organic search results can lead to your brand being associated with that niche over time. Your brand awareness and brand recall strength will increase as time goes on.
* Enhanced Credibility and Legitimacy
Search Engine’s organic / natural results are viewed as authority referrals.
* Investment in your Domain Name
Your investment in SEO is an investment in the value of your domain name and your website as a whole.
* Competitive Edge and Research Advantage
Competitors who see you succeed and beat them out in major search, may in turn bow down to you and want to strike deal with you in any number of business negotiations. Or, you may one day say – hey, I have too much new business coming to me on the web, can you handle my overflow for me and I’ll take a cut????
* Ad Spend predictability and High Return on Investment (ROI)
Optimization has more predictable long term costs and ROI metrics as compared to other components of marketing strategies.
* Passive Business Development
Organic rankings help build traffic from other long-tail (more specific) terms and you site gains more and more momentum.

Expanding on each of these points in greater detail, Jake provides some outstanding reasons why all small businesses should be engaging in SEO. The overall benefit received is substantial, provided the person or company doing your SEO really knows their stuff. While many suggest that good SEO is expensive, like ignorance, not doing SEO properly can be even more expensive.