Search engine optimization helps you rank better on search engines like Google and Bing. While there are countless different strategies, they all lead to the same benefits and help achieve the same results.
We’ve devised this concise list to demonstrate how SEO can help your business thrive. Here are the top 10 SEO benefits every business can gain from investing in SEO!
Table of Contents
1. Attract Targeted Traffic
One of the main benefits of SEO is that it attracts targeted traffic. SEO is an essential part of any online marketing strategy and because it focuses heavily on keywords, you can tailor it to target specific types of customers.
Investing in SEO allows you to position your website at the top of SERPs for specific keyword your targeted audience searches for. That way, you attract more people who are likely to convert.
Generally, SEO helps you attract more people who are already interested in the products or services you offer. This means that they're more likely to buy from you, sign up for your email list, or take whatever action you’d like them to take. 
2. Build Brand Awareness
When your website appears at the top of search results, people begin to associate your brand with the keywords they searched for. Over time, this will help build brand awareness and loyalty.
Appearing higher guarantees increased visibility. Considering that today, around 58% of consumers do online research before purchasing from a company, it’s safe to say that appearing higher in search engine results guarantees increased visibility. Plus, it can help you create brand-related keywords that will be associated with your website, helping you rank better and building brand awareness.
3. Enhance Credibility
The focus of SEO is to build up your search ranking, which depends on the quality and relevance of a page’s content and its website structure and authority.
If your site checks all of these metrics, then search engines consider it to be a credible source. This way, you build trust with your audience, while simultaneously positioning yourself as a thought leader in your niche.
When attempting to build credibility through SEO, it’s important to remember the following few things:
- Focus on the quality of your content: Avoid duplicate content and ensure that the main keywords target the right topic. Don’t fill your articles or landing pages with too much content — using tools like Ahrefs can help you find the right keywords and target a good word count for your content.
- Work on backlinking: Backlinking strategies can help boost the credibility of your website. When other websites reference you as a relevant source, it signals to search engines that your content effectively addresses users’ questions. To achieve this, you can try buying backlinks on your own or consider working with link-building companies.
- Keep your content up to date: The quality of your content will boost credibility, but none of it will matter if it’s not up to date. New articles with recent information about your industry are more likely to generate traffic and boost your credibility.
4. Drive Organic Traffic
Some businesses choose to prioritize paid search, opting to invest heavily in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  While PPC can be effective, it does have its drawbacks, so using it alongside a detailed SEO strategy could be a more effective approach.
Organic searches generate more traffic than paid ads — 8.5x to be exact, for every 1 click on a paid ad. What’s more, SEO generates more clicks than PPC ads and provides better conversion rates — on average, SEO conversion rates are 2.4% across all industries, compared to just 1.3% for PPC ads.
A good PPC agency can help you craft a winning strategy, but they’ll also tell you to explore and mix SEO and PPC for the best results.
5. Cost Efficient
It’s not a secret that SEO is more cost-effective than most types of digital marketing. SEO generates organic traffic, which is free, while PPC brings in paid traffic, meaning you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Moreover, with paid ads, you need to keep an eye out on the competition regarding ad ranking. Since you're bidding on keywords, it’s not uncommon for your competitors to outbid you and get the better Google spot.
This doesn’t happen with PPC, where you solely focus on providing quality content, navigation, and overall experience for the customers — things you can do on your own without paying a lot.
6. Provide Real-Time Analytics
A huge benefit of SEO is that it allows you to track your efforts in real time. While with traditional marketing, you must wait to see its results, with SEO, you can check in a matter of days if your in-house or outsourced SEO service is working.
A tool you can use to assess the performance of your SEO efforts is Google Analytics. It allows you to monitor metrics like traffic, conversions, bounce rates, and time spent on your site to know if your strategy pays off.
7. Boost PPC Marketing
We've already discussed the differences between PPC marketing and SEO and that they both offer some perks. So why not use both to boost your website’s popularity?
One of the benefits of search engine optimization is that it can serve as a driving force for your other marketing efforts. For example, you can merge it with paid ads and get double the traffic and customer interest.
Your PPC campaigns can serve as an additional boost while you drive more people to your business with SEO. Moreover, insights from your SEO analysis, such as keyword research, can be transferred to your PPC campaigns to enhance their KPIs too.
8. Help Outrank the Competition
Today, every business works on a different SEO strategy in hopes to rank among the first few results on SERPs or at least on the first page. A Backlinko research revealed that people don’t usually go to the second page of Google — only 0.63% of Google searches end with something from the second page.
With 5.45 billion internet users, you can be confident that your competitors are working hard to improve their marketing. This is where your SEO efforts can really stand out.
One of the advantages of SEO is that it can help you outrank your competitors — just by providing good content and working on improving your website. You can invest in a proven strategy by doing a competitor analysis and seeing what works for them or consider hiring a company to do on-page and off-page SEO for you.
9. Grow Local Marketing
Another important SEO marketing benefit is the local intent. SEO consists of many components and one of them is local SEO. It refers to building your website ranking for local searches.
This type of SEO can be particularly helpful for smaller businesses and those looking to grow. An increasing amount of people look for “near me” products and services, making SEO essential to help you start building a name for yourself locally. If you’re unsure where to being, local SEO agencies can help you get the most out of your SEO strategy.
10. Help Improve User Experience
The final SEO benefit on our list is the boost in UX it provides. If users like your website, think its content is relevant, and find everything they need quickly, then Google will consider you a good competitor. And the reward? Better ranking.
Offering a good user experience means people are more likely to come back to your site and become loyal customers. But we’re not just talking about web UX — mobile UX is also crucial since mobile website traffic is on the rise, with over 54% at the end of 2023.
Here are a few tips that can help improve your UX via SEO:
- Create a detailed site map.
- Structure every topic around a main keyword with several secondary keywords as subcategories.
- Work on internal and external linking by connecting with others in the industry.
- Fix all broken links.
- Focus on improving your site speed — Portent found that sites that load in one second have a three times higher conversion rate than those that load in five seconds.
SEO Benefits Takeaways
Search engine optimization is a clever and cost-efficient way to market and boost your business. The SEO benefits you can reap are endless, starting with the fact that every business is sure to improve its website’s ranking and visibility in SERPs, as well as bring more traffic.
SEO also provides an opportunity to always stay compliant with Google’s ever-changing algorithms and rules. Moreover, optimizing your search engine tactic will boost user experience and result in better and broader brand awareness.
If you need help getting your business on top of SERPs, try the best SEO agencies right from our directory!
