Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for websites for a variety of reasons. The involvement of the customer experience, your targeted keywords, headings and subheadings, even the very cleanliness and organization of the code of the website are just a few of the many pieces of the overall SEO puzzle. Yet the largest factor has been the way search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing chooses to rank your site in relation to its competition. Over the years, web users have grown to trust search engines and their results. And nearly every part of your website influences those results. Here are six reasons you shouldn’t overlook the SEO part of your website.

1. Help search engines understand your site

One way Google and other search engines identify websites is through a series of tags that exist in the code of your website. During your website’s creation, meta tags should be strategically labeled in order to communicate the correct message about each individual page on your website. Meta tags are snippets of code that are primarily used for page titles and descriptions, at least when it comes to SEO.

Google Search goes a step further and recognizes structured data. Structured data is like meta tags on steroids. This data more precisely identifies unique aspects of your website for search engines like products, job listings, restaurant menus, local events, and more. Both of these sets of information help the search engines index and categorize your web pages.  

2. Rank higher than your competition

Very few users ever venture to the second page of Google’s search engine results. This means it is incredibly important to have your web pages rank as high as possible. When SEO is strategically selected and properly installed, your web pages are more likely to rank above the competition, both locally and nationally. This will gain your website a higher percentage of the traffic available for those search terms.

3. Be found for your key terms

Without properly configuring the SEO on your website, you leave the all-important task of categorizing each of your web pages to the search engine’s artificial intelligence. This could lead to not only poor rankings, but also impressions for search terms that aren’t relevant to your web pages. Being diligent and calculated with your website’s SEO is going to bring users that are much more likely to engage with your content. Attract the right audience, not the users whose search terms will lead to a lack of interest and frequent bounce offs.

4. Search engines rank pages, not websites

It is important to note that Google, as well as other search engines, no longer rank the entirety of websites, but rather, they rank individual pages on those websites instead. This allows you to rank for your individual products and services rather than just a generic category. It also means that you should create individual pages for your products or services, and therefore, have an entire page worth of SEO tags dedicated to them.

5. Gain more organic traffic

Imagine if the only way to find your website was to search its name. Direct traffic makes up a significant portion of traffic to websites, but there is a larger portion of users that don’t know your business. Every day, those users are searching terms that are very relevant to your products or services, but they have no way to find your website. Having good SEO is going to give your website a higher rank, make more impressions on users, and gain more organic page visits from users that otherwise would have not known you could be of service to them. Without proper SEO, you are leaving a considerable portion of possible customers on the table while allowing for your competitors to scoop them up.

6. Things online are changing all the time

The algorithms that search engines use are constantly evolving to better the user experience. Staying up-to-date on these changes can be critical for your page’s ranking. SEO that is done well can survive these changes with only minor tweaks made along the way to stay fully updated to whatever criteria may come. The way we search is also still developing. Years ago there weren’t a fraction of the searches from mobile devices that there are now. Well over half of all searches today are completed on mobile devices.

One of the new ways search is evolving is through voice activation. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Search Assistant allow users to browse the web by vocal command. Relevant and well-constructed SEO will get your website or business to broadcast out of one of these devices and into the ears of a possible customer.

Another advancement is Google’s rich results which use structured data to highlight key information at the top of search results. These are the card like boxes you see above normal search results. They highlight key information like recipes, news posts, restaurant menus, department numbers, etc. Search engine optimization will ensure your site can be recognized by the ever-growing advancements in search capabilities.

Getting ahead of the competition and being easily accessible to your customers are just a few ways SEO can benefit you. It’s important for your company to attract not just any audience, but the right audience. Now is the time to improve your SEO. Contact us today and let us help you improve your rank on search engines!