Do I need Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy designed to ensure that people looking for your products and services can actually find your website amidst the billions of webpages online today. Unless your company offers something so truly unique that you have zero competition, you need SEO to help you stand out from the crowd and appear at the top of the search results page.

The Changing SEO Landscape

If you’ve been following the world of search engine optimization (SEO) over the past few years, you might know that in the new SEO landscape, content is king. Search engines now give higher preference to webpages with quality content, rather than simply to those pages that have the highest keyword density for the words and phrases that your customers type into their Google, Bing, or Yahoo search bars. However, just because it’s no longer possible to “trick” search engines into giving your content preferential treatment doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. Your content still needs proper management and keyword optimization in order to successfully drive traffic to your site. Here are the most important things your SEO service provider should be doing for you.

Reducing Your Bounce Rate

SEO Bounce Rate
In the past, web developers were able to direct traffic to their webpages by stuffing it full of keywords. This made for tons of site visitors, but as each visitor viewed the content and found that it was just fluff, they would quickly exit the site. This pattern of spending just a few seconds on a site before moving on is what we mean by bounce rate. Search engines now penalize sites that have high bounce rates, correctly assuming that sites that can’t hold a consumer’s attention do not have high-quality content. By getting an SEO professional to create superior content on topics of interest to your customers, you can encourage visitors to spend more time on your site, which reduces your bounce rate, improves your site’s authority, increases your position in search result rankings, and ultimately improves your chances of making sales.

Improving your Local Search Results

Search engine algorithms now have a location component, meaning that a consumer’s web browser remembers where they are located and delivers search results tailored to their local area. As a business owner, you need to make sure you show up in the correct local search results for your target audience. Obviously this is especially important for businesses that offer real-world services that must be delivered in person. Your SEO provider should be optimizing your pages to help you capture local traffic from both mobile and desktop searches.

Improving Your Conversion Rates

Remember, bottom line, the purpose of SEO is to allow you to make sales. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring an SEO campaign by site hits alone. If you are getting tons of hits, this should naturally be accompanied by a rise in sales. If you’re not seeing the sales increase, you need to consider updating your website with more user-friendly navigation, better product descriptions, more competitive pricing, etc. This way, you can ensure that you are positioned to get the full benefit of the increased exposure that your SEO campaign is generating.