Without SEO You Could Lose Customers
The Internet has fundamentally changed the way customers make purchasing decisions. Nowadays, the central source of information for your customers today is the Internet, where consumers can find any information about the market, products and companies.
“70% of the purchase process is completed before the customer contacts you!”
If your information is not there when you search for a supplier, cannot be found or is of poor quality, you will not be considered in the purchase decision — it’s as simple as that.
Certainly, a customer buys online as well as offline (physical stores), but he informs himself online first. 70 % of consumers today already inform themselves on the Internet before making a purchasing decision. For B2B decision-makers, the Internet is the number one source of information, above of all other sources of information!
Customers spend less and less time looking for alternatives
The quality of goods has increased in recent years, as such there is no longer such a big risk when deciding on the right product, and many are also very similar and have become interchangeable. What matters is the customer service and the shopping experience, and why they chose a certain company and its products.
With the ever-increasing amount of information available online, it is becoming more and more difficult for customers to find the right offer and those who can provide them that have the better cards. And with the amount of information, the search may seem endless to most consumers. That’s why customers stop looking once they have found what they are looking for.
The decision is quickly made: 66.4% of potential customers consider only 2–3 offers to be relevant at all and then stop searching. If you can’t be found during the information research phase, or provide bad content as well as a bad shopping experience, you will not be included in the selection.
Search Engine Optimization comes to the rescue
This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. It is strategy used to increase the visibility of a website on search engines, and by successfully employing it, SEO you will be able to boost your competitive position, ensuring you’re among the first businesses customers see and trust for the things they need most exactly when they need them.
How to successfully employ SEO
For instance, to improve the SEO of a website, it is important to continually focus on on-page and off-page strategies, since search engines typically change algorithms between 500 and 600 times per year. On-page factors include quality content, optimized site architecture, and improved HTML; whereas off-page factors include the creation of high quality backlinks and social sharing.
One of the key points in managing content in SEO is optimizing for the right keywords. If you are ranking for a specific keyword, tie it with your brand name. This will provide you with anchor phrases that you can link to relevant pages and allow you to establish contextual relevance with your brand and your target keywords.
Other strategies used to improve your search engine content include directing link to URLs off your site- being affiliated with other reputable images; pitching journalists or bloggers or editors or content creators on the web to write about you; creating your own content; leveraging high-ranking platforms and influence SERPs features, amongst others. All of these will help boost your visibility and ranking on SERPs.
In order for consumers to become customers, they need to see the most representative information, so you need effective SEO to rank and feature the strengths of your brand. Consistently publishing content without implementing effective SEO tactics will not be very effective in the long run, as SEO cements the search results, giving them longevity as well as better performance.
