Super8

By now, most marketers and business owners know that SEO is a critical factor for driving website traffic. If your site and content aren’t properly optimized, both for desktop and mobile users, you’ll have an incredibly difficult time attracting traffic from organic search your site.

However, there are many benefits of SEO aside from increased traffic. This post will outline 10 other important benefits that stem from having a properly SEO-optimized website.

1. Proper optimization not only means better rankings, it means a better user experience

There’s no question that user experience is now a significant ranking factor. The search engines want to see a mobile-friendly design, good user signals (high time on site, low bounce rates, etc.) and good integration of relevant photos and videos. These elements are all important for providing a great experience for your visitors as well; in other words, by optimizing your site for SEO, you’re automatically also improving your user experience. And a great user experience means higher conversion rates, more trust, and increased brand loyalty.

2. Organic search may account for as much of 64% of all website visits

A study by Conductor of over 310 million visits to 30 different websites showed that organic search accounted for 64% of all referral traffic. While other research seems to indicate that social media has now overtaken search slightly in terms of referrals, there’s no question that search remains a critical source of traffic for most businesses.

3. SEO leads tend to have higher close rates than outbound leads

According to this article at Search Engine Journal, SEO leads result in an average close rate of 14.6%, compared to close rates of 1.7% for outbound leads. While I can’t verify the original source of this statistic, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were true; it makes sense that searchers who are looking for specific products or services are more likely to make a purchase from businesses who they seek out through search, rather than those who attempt to attract them using outbound marketing strategies (i.e. cold leads).

4. Inbound marketing methods (including SEO) result in more leads than outbound, paid media or self-sourced leads

According to the 2014-2015 State of Inbound Marketing report, B2B, B2C and non-profit companies all report inbound practices as being their primary source of leads. This same report found that among marketing professionals, SEO had become the #1 source of leads over the previous 6 month period. One question to ask yourself is: if you’re not generating leads through search, who is capturing these valuable leads?

5. Ranking in local search directly leads to increased visits and sales

If you run a local business, optimizing your site for local search is absolutely critical. More and more consumers are using local search queries to identify local businesses and to find locations, hours and directions.

According to Google, 50% of consumers who performed a local search on a mobile device visited a store on that same day. These searches also led to higher sales: 18% of local mobile searches led to a sale within one day. For more local mobile marketing stats, see my article 6 Local Mobile SEO Stats Every Online Marketer Needs To Know.

6. Marketers rank SEO as one of their most effective digital marketing strategies

To see how effective something is, sometimes it’s best to go directly to the source. According to the 2015 State of Marketing report, of the marketers who are using SEO and SEM as part of their marketing strategy, 66% find it “very effective or effective”. Only 7% stated that their SEO efforts were “not very effective or not at all effective”.  These seem like reasonable odds to me!

7. SEO leads to increased credibility for your brand

Ranking highly in the search results signals to searchers that you’re a key player in your industry. Conversely, ranking on the 2^nd or 3^rd page may lead to unwanted assumptions: that you’re a new business, that you’re not as well known or that you don’t have the budget (and thus sales) to afford to boost your rankings.

8. SEO can be a less hands-on strategy than other inbound techniques

Social media and email marketing are both highly effective channels for generating leads, but both require some degree of continual effort. To remain top of mind for your customers and prospects, you have to be continually pushing out new content to your list and social media followers. However, once a page is SEO-optimized, you can often sit back, relax, and let it climb the rankings on its own merit. This, of course, largely depends on certain factors such as the competitiveness of the keyword(s) you’re targeting, and the quality of the content on the page, among others. But in general, once you lay the foundation of proper SEO-optimization for any given page, most of the hard work is already done.

9. Being on the 2^nd or 3^rd page of the search results means virtually no search visibility

Some business owners forgo any formal SEO efforts because they believe that being in the search results (anywhere in the results) is “good enough”. However, research by Moz shows that 71.33% of clicks happen on page oneof the search results. Properly optimizing your site and content are key to achieving top rankings; and therefore any degree of search visibility.

10.   The vast majority of consumers research products online before going to a store

Research from GE Capital Retail Bank shows that 81% of shoppers research and compare products online before making a local purchase. Other research puts this number as high as 94% for B2B buyers. Achieving first page rankings for your business and products is critical if you want consumers who are actively searching out your products to be able to find you.

Source: Forbes

The use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has increased rapidly and they have overtaken the desktop as the primary method of accessing the web. With users accessing the Internet via smartphones and tablets, rather than a desktop computer, the importance of having a mobile-friendly website becomes paramount.

Each client today needs a responsive version of their website that could run smoothly on all devices (desktop/mobile/tablet). Responsive web design is one of the most powerful modern concepts in the web design arena, but the question is: Why does responsive web design matter for your website? Before we understand that, we must understand what exactly “Responsive Web Design” is.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is simply a technique for developing websites in a manner that all of the website content, images, and structure remain the same on any device. This means the website can work seamlessly on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop screens. A responsive web design is a design that can handle all types of users, on any device.

This technique is very popular because with a responsive website design, we don’t have to worry about creating different websites for different devices. In other words, there is no need to design separate websites specifically for the laptop, mobile device, and desktop screen resolutions.

Why should you invest in responsive design?

We live in a multi-screen society. Because of this, it’s important for your site to be viewable across as many devices as possible, because you never know what device someone will be using to view your website.

Responsive website stats suggest that it’s wise to appeal to both desktop and mobile viewers. The number of mobile viewers now outnumbers desktop, and this number will only continue to rise as global smartphone accessibility increases.

Additionally, in early 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness would become a ranking factor in its search engine algorithms. This meant that sites that were mobile-friendly would potentially lose some ground in search engine results because they wouldn’t be delivering a good experience to mobile searchers and viewers.

Some reasons why responsive design matters and why it is important to the success of any website:

1. Increasing Mobile Usage

Recent studies have proved that mobile usage and adoption has overtaken desktop usage and responsive design allows the same website to work on all devices.

2. Better UX 

Responsive websites make visitors happy with your site. And the click-through-rates increase 21-24% with a responsive website as compared to mobile versions or any other versions.

3. Maintenance Is Minimum

Before responsive design we had only 2 options:

1. Create a desktop site that would look small and inconvenient on mobile devices.
2. Create a separate dedicated mobile site which would work on a mobile device’s browser.

The above options increase the cost and time involved in maintenance as you need to update both websites on a regular basis and if you chose only the desktop variant, you run the risk of losing out on potential mobile users and mobile-based revenue.

This also ensures that we need to make an update to the site only once and it will update all versions of the site.

4. Responsive Design Is Preferred for SEO

Google and other search engines prefer responsive websites. Google recommends and promotes responsive website design. In many research studies, it has been found that responsive websites usually perform better and load in just one second or less, making it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.

This is the reason SEO guys prefer a responsive version, because these sites have one URL and the same HTML, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content from just single URL.

5. Reduced Bounce Rate Due to a Better User Experience

High bounce rates are usually taken as a negative sign by search engines. There are a number of reasons that contribute to a high bounce rate, with a major reason being non-responsive design. So how can you reduce your bounce rate?

The solution is responsive design. Responsive websites have lower bounce rates as compared to their non-responsive counterparts. Responsive websites offer all the website content to users in a package that is easy to view and manage, hence ultimately keeping users on your page and reducing your bounce rate.

6. Reduces the Page Load Speed

Page load time is one of the major factors when it comes to search engine rankings. Google always rewards fast-loading web pages, which load in just one second or less. Responsive design results in fast loading and Google can discover the content more efficiently and easily index all the content.

7. The Future Is Mobile

With mobile phones being increasingly used for searching and making purchases online, you need to provide the audience a mobile-friendly site. So making your website responsive is an essential aspect of your online presence.