Introduction to SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation in full. A term you may not have heard of until recently. If you take the online transition of your business seriously, this is without a doubt one of the best digital marketing investments you can make.

The intent of this article is not to help you understand all aspects of SEO in detail (that’s for another blog post). This is an introduction. That means that after reading this article you will have an answer to a whole series of questions. What is SEO? Why do you need SEO and what are the consequences if you invest in it? How can you leverage SEO? What do you have to take into account? How much does it cost to invest in this?

What is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It includes all the work you can do on your website itself (on-page SEO) and outside the website (off-page SEO) to get higher in Google’s search results. When you rank high for search terms (keywords), your website is much more visible. This then equals to a higher number of visitors to your website. These visitors are looking for your services and/or products. That’s why a percentage of them will become your customer / client.

Because you are found for search terms that are directly related to what you offer and the problem the potential consumer is experiencing, the chance of conversion (effectively converting the visitor into a paying customer) is much higher. It’s a very good way to get in touch with people who are looking for your product or service and therefore also a very effective form of digital marketing. If you want to achieve online growth  (or growth in general), an SEO strategy cannot be missing from your digital marketing strategy. When you combine these with other digital marketing strategies, you can expect even better results.

The goal of SEO is clear: increase the online visibility with your target group. There’s no point in investing in SEO if it doesn’t lead to measurable results.

For OMNIA Web Agency, developing a complete online business strategy is an essential part of our existence.

But how exactly does this work?

Every time someone enters a search term into Google, you’ll be presented with a search results page. These are not displayed randomly. In order for a company/website to reach the top of the results (or even the first page), a lot of work has to be done.

This includes link building, citation building and writing (optimised) blog posts. All this must be the result of a comprehensive Digital Marketing Campaign.

Why every business needs SEO.

Leveraging SEO is directly linked to the decision to invest in a professional website. That is where your digital strategy should always start. But, it’s not the only choice you have to make.

Once you have chosen to invest in a professional website, you must answer the following question:

• Do I want a professional, online business card or
• Do I want to achieve (online) growth with my website?

It’s a fact that even without SEO (or other forms of digital marketing), having a professional website brings a lot of benefits. However, when a website without SEO might get you a few extra sales per year (usually through offline referrals), investing in SEO will get you many new customers per month.

Extra profit and turnover may be the end goal, or end result when you invest in SEO. But it’s certainly not the only advantage or the only reason to invest in this. Below are the 7 top reasons why every business needs SEO.

In SEO, the customer is central

Unlike, for example, placing advertisements, cold calling potential customers and sending emails, with SEO you don’t have to contact the customer yourself. The customer will come to you. It’s therefore customer focused rather than marketer focused.

Before customers come to your website, they have either already heard of you and/or your company, or they are looking for a solution to which you offer them an answer (thanks to an informative blog post, for example).

Higher conversion

Thanks to the above facts, the conversion rate is much higher in SEO compared to the other marketing efforts mentioned. Let me clarify this with numbers.

The conversion via SEO is around 15% (inbound leads), while with, for example, cold calling and sending emails to prospects who do not know you yet, this is only around  2% (outbound leads). In other words, when you get 1 000 visitors to your website through SEO, about 150 people of these will become customers. If you reached 1 000 people through a paying ad, only about 20 people would become customers. On top of that, SEO is cheaper than many other marketing efforts.

The chance of success is very high

This research from Hubspot provided some very important insights into the outcomes of inbound marketing (this includes developing a professional digital marketing strategy).

No fewer than 92% of the more than 5 000 companies surveyed indicated an increase in the number of visitors to their website. For 29% of them, this increase was more than 100%. For more than 50% this was an increase of at least 25%.

The best way to get more visitors

Make no mistake, even though SEO is described in Hubspot’s research as the 2nd best way to get more traffic to your website, it’s actually the best way. Let me explain.

In their research, a distinction was made between SEO and blogging. However, “content marketing”; optimising your website content has been one of the most important aspects of SEO for many years. It should therefore not be viewed as a separate item. Renewing website content and providing valuable information has been central since the Google algorithm updates of 2011 and 2012 (Panda and Penguin).

With us, blogging is almost always part of our custom-built Digital Marketing Package. What’s more, you can also contact us for the third listed method – social media.

In other words, derived from this extensive research, when you let us work out a full SEO and SMM (social media marketing) strategy, this one marketing investment includes about 60% of the best methods to get more get visitors to your website. Our further optimisation of your website texts for conversion as well as the development of landing pages and email marketing campaigns, can increase this figure to more than 90%. Especially when you start working on reputation marketing, you will become unstoppable!

The best way to get more customers

As I wrote before, SEO and the broader concept of inbound marketing ensures a higher conversion of your visitors. Almost 93% of the companies that use these strategies, generate more customers (lead generation). In other words, besides a big increase in traffic, you will see an even bigger increase in how many leads you are effectively converting into paying customers for your business. Almost 40% of companies saw an increase of more than 100%. More than 55% of the companies surveyed showed an increase of at least 50%.

These figures apply to the broader meaning of inbound marketing. So what about SEO, blogging and all kinds of website optimisations?

Well, the research showed techniques such as calls to action and optimising landing pages to be the best method for about 23% of the companies. However, for 22%, blogging was still the best method, and SEO is therefore very closely linked to this. It’s important to remember here that applying on-page and off-page SEO techniques, in combination with blogging, is usually a lot cheaper than having landing pages designed (which still have to be found via either advertisements, and/or SEO).

That’s why we can conclude that a fully developed digital marketing strategy produces very good results and the largest increase in both turnover and profit for your company.

Results (ROI) can be seen quickly – More visitors

Furthermore, this survey found that 85% of companies saw an increase in their number of visitors within 7 months. This coincides perfectly with our own experience.

Under certain conditions, we guarantee that your website will come up on the first page of Google within 6 months. However, this does not mean that you cannot see results much earlier.

The study also found that almost 17% already saw results within one month, and as much as 48% after 2-4 months. Only a very small percentage of the companies surveyed saw results after a longer period of time.

Results (ROI) can be seen quickly – More customers

The time to see an increase in effectively converting leads (prospects, prospects) was very similar to seeing an increase in traffic.

Nearly 84% saw an increase in their number of leads within 7 months. Less than 2% of companies saw no increase within 12 months.

How can you get started with SEO and what does it cost – or rather, what does it yield?

If you have come to this point in the article, you know perfectly what SEO is, you already have an idea which strategies it includes and what the many advantages are to leverage them.

So now it’s time to see how you can take effective action and reap the benefits of an SEO strategy yourself.

Do you want to do this yourself? Then be prepared to invest hundreds of hours in understanding all the processes and strategies and looking for what works and what doesn’t… Without any guarantee of results.

However, there is a much cheaper way. Namely outsourcing your SEO work to a professional. If you want the best results, you can contact OMNIA Web Agency.

Before I go into the exact steps and costs, I first want to give you some more explanation about the SEO process.

As part of a case study with one of my first projects, I have developed a complete Digital Marketing Campaign. I have fully optimised all pages for SEO, with the right, relevant keywords. All photos have the correct alt tags, the page has interesting descriptions for the search results (meta data), in other words, (almost) all steps of our current Digital Marketing Campaign were included herein. And what were the results, do you think?

After a few weeks, the pages started to rank higher in Google. However, after a year, the website in question started to fall further and further down in the search results. This is because SEO is not a one-time process, but a process that requires ongoing efforts. Only in this way can you achieve lasting results, also in the long term.

It is indeed possible to see short-term results when you apply the SEO “best practices” once. However, it’s only a matter of time (usually no more than a few months) before you will fall back below competitors who do make monthly SEO efforts.

The foundation is always laid with a Digital Marketing Campaign. This campaign then transitions into the monthly efforts associated with your chosen digital marketing strategies.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to know is what this can bring you…

To know this as accurately as possible, it is essential to have a free introductory meeting. We have developed a formula to calculate this.

I hope you have learned a lot after reading this article. In the future, links will be added to other SEO articles. For now, the most important thing is that you know what results are possible with SEO and that you can’t get good, lasting results without monthly efforts.