What are the advantages and disadvantages of SEO?

Advantages of SEO

The first thing you need to understand is how important SEO can be for your business and what benefits to your business you can expect to reap. There are many different advantages depending on which kind of SEO you use and how well you implement it. Whether or not you decide to use SEO as your main form of marketing will depend entirely on the age of your business, the niche of your business, and your marketing budget, but you cannot make an educated decision until you have all the facts.

Better User Experience

You want to attract people to your website, but the kinds of people you attract are more important than the sheer volume. You can draw loads of people to your website, but if they are not in your target demographic, then it doesn’t do you any good. It is vital to ensure that the potential clients that come to your website are likely to become customers.

When you employ SEO tactics, you choose keywords that are likely to be searched for by potential customers in your target demographic. When you use SEO tactics, your business stays on brand and communicates with people who are already looking for what you are selling. Instead of interrupting a user’s time with advertisements, you are helping them solve a problem. This gives your users the best and most relevant experience to their search and will generate more positive business for you.

Primary Source of Leads

Investing in an SEO marketing strategy is one of the smartest uses of your marketing budget. There are no “peak times” during the year to use SEO, and it is not a seasonal advertising tactic. It will keep working all day and all year with very little management or input on your part. It is a very low maintenance form of marketing.

It also has a very high rate of return on investment. Because it is used to get your business into the view of people who are already searching for solutions you can provide, there is a much higher chance that they will become a customer than a random advertisement. Your ideal customer comes to you instead of you having to sort through endless potential customers to find the golden client.

Building Brand Credibility

Everyone knows that people do not go past page one of the search engine results when looking for a solution to their problems. If they cannot find the answer on page one, then they search for something new. This, in part, is a matter of convenience, but it is also tied to credibility.

Showing up as a result on the first page of search engine results sets your business up to be an authority in your field. It gives you a marked advantage over your competitors that do not rank as high on search engines. It sets your business up as an established business that has been around for a long time that people can trust.

Establishing Brand Awareness

Using proper SEO tactics helps you to establish your brand as an authority. It also allows you to be noticed and easily recognized by a much wider audience. Establishing this level of brand awareness means a lot more traffic to your website and more friend referrals from current customers. If you couple this with social media marketing strategies, you can be periodically put in front of your target demographic when they are online.

The more people are able to see your business, the easier they are able to recognize it above the competition. Even if someone doesn’t need your services right now, you want your business to come to their mind if they need them in the future. Establishing this brand awareness is what makes you stand out from the competition and brings you more organic visits to your website or business.

Building Trust

Whether it is a conscious decision or an unconscious one, people trust the search engine results. They trust the ability of the search engine to give them the most pertinent matches to their search on the first page. Because of this, search engines like Google basically refer businesses to customers.

Because Google is seen as an authority in recommending businesses, you want to be one of the businesses that Google refers to your demographic. Showing up in the first page in a user’s search results will be seen as a friend recommending your business to the person performing the search. This gives you an added measure of trust with a potential client.

Long-Term Marketing Strategy

One crucial thing to note is that SEO is not a short-term solution to our marketing strategy. SEO is designed to be used as a long-term solution for a viable and profitable method of growth. Because it is a long-term solution, it has more lasting results than any shorter and quicker marketing strategies.

Short term solutions like pay per click advertising (PPC) may give you a quicker result, but you will have to put in added work and money to get those results. There are many advantages and disadvantages of PPC as well, but investing lower amounts of money and less effort and waiting and using SEO strategies will give you a better return on your investment.